Teaching & Learning

English Literature

Teaching & Learning

English Literature

Ellie Chambers & Marshall Gregory

SAGE Publications

London

(

Thousand Oaks

(

New Delhi

Ellie Chambers and Marshall Gregory, 2006

First published 2006

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or
private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may
be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any
means, only with the prior permission in writing of the
publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in
accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright
Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside
those terms should be sent to the publishers.

SAGE Publications Ltd
1 Oliver’s Yard
55 City Road
London EC1Y 1SP

SAGE Publications Inc
2455 Teller Road
Thousand Oaks, California 91320

SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd
B-42, Panchsheel Enclave
Post Box 4109
New Delhi 110 017

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library

ISBN-10 0-7619-4171-1

ISBN-13 978-0-7619-4171-2

ISBN-10 0-7619-4172-X ISBN-13 978-0-7619-4172-9 (pbk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2005934569

Typeset by TW Typesetting, Plymouth, Devon
Printed in Great Britain by Athenaeum Press, Gateshead
Printed on paper from sustainable resources

Contents

Acknowledgements

vii

Teaching and Learning the Humanities in Higher Education

Foreword

Introduction

The discipline today

In crisis?

From ancient pedagogy . . .

. . . To the modern academy

Intrinsic justification

What is good teaching?

‘Teaching’ and ‘good teaching’

An approach to teaching close reading: textual analysis and

interpretation

Postscript

Teaching literary theory and teaching writing

‘Positioning’ literary theory

Approaching the teaching of theory and criticism

Teaching theory and criticism

Approaches to teaching academic writing

Academic literacies

Writing pedagogy

Postscript

Planning for teaching: curriculum and course design 91

‘Modelling’ curriculum design

The curriculum

Curriculum aims

Subject benchmarking

Course design issues

107

Progression

114

Models of curriculum design revisited

118

Postscript

120

Methods of teaching

122

‘Good teaching’ revisited

122

Teaching beginning students: socio-cultural pedagogic

principles

125

Working methods: methods that work

135

Electronic teaching methods

156

Postscript

158

Student assessment

161

Transparent assessment criteria and standards

162

Designing an assessment regime

168

Feedback and learning

176

Various forms of assessment

182

Postscript

190

Evaluating teaching; future trends

193

Evaluating courses and teaching

193

Trends

205

Bibliography

212

Index

223

Appendices

(on the book’s website: www.sagepub.co.uk/chambers.pdf)
1 Text of ‘Araby’
2 Teaching theoretical orientations: a tutorial
3 Sample curricula
4 Sample exam papers
5 Generic and graduate skills
6 Sample course assessment designs
7 Electronic sources

Teaching & Learning English Literature

Acknowledgements

Many colleagues and students have contributed to this book – on both
sides of the Atlantic, in formal discussion and conversation – some-
times unwittingly. To all of them, thank you. In particular, thanks
should go to Wayne Booth, whose conversations and collaborations
with Marshall Gregory over four decades have been foundational to
Gregory’s views about teaching, and to the many faculty members
who over the years have participated in Gregory’s pedagogy seminars.
Conversations with them have given him a level of intellectual
stimulation and motive for thinking through pedagogical issues that
all too few faculty members are fortunate enough to receive.

In addition, we would like to acknowledge valuable contributions to

the book from the following colleagues: Ann Dashwood, University of
Southern Queensland; Dr Sara Haslam (Arts Faculty) and Dr Mary Lea
and Simon Rae (IET), the UK Open University; Professor Graham
Gibbs, University of Oxford, and Claire Simpson. We would also like
to thank Professor Ben Knights (Director) and the staff of the Higher
Education Academy English Subject Centre, Royal Holloway London,
for use of their exemplary website.

Special thanks go to Nigel Blake, Philosopher of Education, who

read and made insightful comments on all the draft chapters. And to
our series editor, Jan Parker, who has carried out her task sympatheti-
cally and imaginatively. Our thanks, too, to Sage Publications and their
editors: patient, forbearing and highly professional colleagues. Finally,
we would like to thank our partners and families for their much
appreciated encouragement and support throughout the composition
and revision of the manuscript that eventually turned into this book.

Teaching and Learning

the Humanities in Higher

Education

SERIES EDITORS: Ellie Chambers and Jan Parker, The Open
University

This series for beginning and experienced lecturers deals with all
aspects of teaching individual arts and humanities subjects in higher
education. Experienced teachers offer authoritative suggestions to
enable beginning and experienced lecturers to become critically
reflective about discipline-specific practices.

Each book includes an overview of the main currents of thought in

a subject; major theoretical trends; appropriate teaching and learning
modes and current best practice; new methods of course delivery and
assessment; electronic teaching methods and sources.

Features include:

discussion of key areas of pedagogy: curriculum development,
assessment, teaching styles, professional development, appropri-
ate use of C&IT;

case study illustration of teaching certain problematic topics;

the findings of educational research and sample material of all
kinds drawn from a range of countries and traditions;

suggestions throughout for critical decisions, and alternative
strategies and follow-up activities, so that all teachers are encour-
aged to reflect critically on their assumptions and practices.

The series sets out effective approaches to a wide range of teaching
and teaching-related tasks.

The books are intended as core texts for lecturers working towards

membership of the Higher Education Academy, for adoption by
training course providers, and as professional reference resources. The

books are also suitable for PGCE, and Further and Higher Education
courses. In countries with less formal plans for lecturer training but a
longer tradition of serious attention to pedagogy within the higher
education culture, the series will contribute to the scholarship of
teaching and learning and professional and organisational develop-
ment.

Series titles:
Modern Languages: Learning and Teaching in an Intercultural Field
Alison Phipps and Mike Gonzalez
Teaching and Learning History
Geoff Timmins, Keith Vernon and Christine Kinealy
Teaching and Learning English Literature
Ellie Chambers and Marshall Gregory

Ellie Chambers

is Professor of Humanities Higher Education in the

Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University, UK. Since
1974 she has worked as a pedagogic adviser, evaluator and researcher
with colleagues in the university’s Faculty of Arts. In 1992 she founded
the interdisciplinary Humanities Higher Education Research Group
and in 1994, with colleagues, the national Humanities and Arts Higher
Education Network. She regularly addresses conferences interna-
tionally and has published widely in the fields of distance education
and Arts and Humanities higher education – including the best-selling
book for students, The Arts Good Study Guide (1997, with Andrew
Northedge). Currently, she is founding Editor-in-Chief of Arts and
Humanities in Higher Education: An International Journal of Theory,
Research and Practice (Sage) and a Member of Council, the Society for
Research into Higher Education.

Dr. Jan Parker

is a Senior Research Fellow of The Open University’s

Centre for Research in Education and Educational Technology and
chairs the Humanities Higher Education Research Group. Founding
editor of the Sage journal Arts and Humanities in Higher Education: An
International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice and Executive
Editor of Teaching in Higher Education (Taylor and Francis), she still
teaches and writes on her disciplinary specialisation, Greek Tragedy,
and is a Senior Member of the Faculty of Classics, Cambridge. She is
currently co-writing the Teaching and Learning Classics and Classical
Studies volume of this series.

Teaching & Learning English Literature

Foreword

Those of us working in the national English Subject Centre are acutely
conscious of a paradox. That is that the family of English subjects in
British universities study communication in a very sophisticated way,
and harbour a wide variety of pedagogic methods. Since its inception,
the subject has been committed to what we now know by the
portmanteau phrase ‘learning and teaching’. Yet, by and large,
university teachers of English – in Britain at all events – find it hard
to make their tacit pedagogic knowledge conscious, or to raise it to a
level where it might be critiqued, shared or developed. In our
experience, colleagues find it relatively easy to talk about curriculum
and resources, but far harder to talk about the success or failure of
seminars, how to vary forms of assessment, or to make imaginative
use of Virtual Learning Environments. Too often this reticence means
falling back on default assumptions about student learning, about
teaching or about forms of assessment. There is a real question as to
where new pedagogic understandings may be formed. Thus we are
aware that many starting lecturers and their colleagues pass severe
judgements on the university diploma courses they are required to
take. Meanwhile, for those who seek to support English lecturers, there
is a shortage of subject-specific material to recommend.

Ellie Chambers’ and Marshall Gregory’s timely book cannot provide

all the answers, but it will be found an invaluable resource by new
(and not so new) lecturers in English Literature. It is a thoroughly
researched and stimulatingly detailed addition to the kind of dialogue
that the English Subject Centre seeks to foster. While rich in practical
ideas, it is not simply a compendium of tips. It sets out to ground its
suggestions in a theorised account of the subject – an account which
attends to the grammars that govern the interaction between teachers

and students, the protocols of dialogue and assessment, and above all
to the collaborative nature of the productive processes in which both
teachers and students engage. The underlying argument is that
‘content and pedagogy are inseparable’ [p. 25]. The practical conse-
quence is that the methods teachers choose should be sensitively
attuned to the specific demands of what they are trying to achieve.

This book is articulated along two complementary lines of thought.

The authors rightly refuse to be drawn into what they describe as the
‘knee-jerk reaction that teaching is inherently suspect’ [p. 42]. While
we all have much to learn from the learner-centred orthodoxies of the
last quarter century, teachers nevertheless have responsibilities to-
wards their subject and towards their students. At the same time even
a passionate commitment to the subject needs to be complemented by
hard, careful thought about curriculum and module design, and about
the structuring of seminars. For the other half of the argument is that
‘we cannot assume that our students just know how to read a literary
text’ [p. 47]. Nor do they intuitively know how to take part in a
seminar discussion. While the responsibility of the teacher is to create
and hold the spaces in which learning can take place, that does not in
itself entail a vow of silence. The teacher also has the role of modelling
the discourse, and while it may sometimes be appropriate to withhold
his or her superior knowledge, there are also occasions when it is just
as appropriate to share it. In this light, Chambers and Gregory provide
a wealth of detail about module design, seminar process, assessment,
and feedback, modelling the process of dialogue as they do so.

The great strength of this book is that it is grounded simultaneously

in pedagogic theory and in ‘an approach to teaching in which literary
experience is taken to be an important form of human learning . . .’
[p. 149]. Enriched by this dual focus, it promises to become a welcome
contribution to the teaching of university English.

Ben Knights

Director, English Subject Centre

Higher Education Academy

Teaching & Learning English Literature

xii

Introduction

Whether or not the discipline of English Literature is ‘in crisis’ is
something we consider right at the start of this book. But if not in
crisis, it is certainly a discipline in the process of marked change.
Curriculum, syllabus, teaching and student assessment methods all
are pressured by significant social and political forces. In recent times,
for example, these forces and government policies have produced:

a ‘massification’ of higher education, with no commensurate
increase in resource for teaching;

a dominant discourse of the marketplace;

a related instrumental pedagogic discourse of measurable ‘learn-
ing outcomes’ and skills ‘transferable’ to the workplace, underpin-
ned by a so-called learner-centred ideology;

increased resource for and dependence on information and
communication technologies (ICTs);

a convergence of distance and conventional education and the
emergence of a ‘blended’ form of learning for all.

The study and teaching of English is also shaped by our students’
purposes and the conditions in which they live and work, and by
academics’ shifting ideas about the nature of the discipline and its
relationship to other, adjacent, fields. In the modern world, can we still
talk about English Literature or should we substitute Literatures in
English? What is Literature’s wider relationship to Media and Film
Studies, and Cultural Studies?

At the start of the book we take it as axiomatic that there is an

identifiable discipline of English literature, that it has certain central
characteristics and outer limits. But, as the book progresses and we
examine the curriculum and our teaching and assessment methods in
more detail, boundaries become less distinct. Perhaps limits come to
seem more like limitations. Or maybe they just matter less.

Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in a web
of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and
the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of
law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.

(Geertz, 1975: 5)

Perhaps, after all, the search for meaning is something that unites the
Humanities.

If this hypothesis is worthy of at least provisional acceptance, it

follows that the study and teaching of literature will play a central role
– and has always played a central role – in human beings’ search for
meaning. Literature, as a subset of story, acts, as do all other forms of
story, to perform such all-important functions as telling human beings
what is important in life, telling us what’s worthy of our admiration
or our contempt, telling us what it’s like to be those who live in
different circumstances and in other historical times and in other
gendered bodies, telling us what we should pay attention to and what
we can afford to ignore, and, in short, telling us how life might be lived
this way rather than that way. Among the many different ways that the
Humanities search for meaning, deploying our resources for reading
literature well and teaching it effectively must be among the most
important resources we can deploy in general, not just for disciplinary
purposes but for the more broadly educational purposes of preparing
our students for their overall lives, for their careers, for parenthood,
for civic responsibility and for moral and ethical thoughtfulness.

The book differs somewhat in its aims from others of its kind (for

example, Showalter, 2002; Agathocleus and Dean, 2002; Widdowson,
1999). Written by a US English professor and an educationist with an
academic background in Literature, it aims to introduce its audience
to an analysis of how educational ideas – both ‘classic’ texts and recent
research – illuminate our subject. Literature is always at the heart of
things, but from there we try to move ‘out’ to make fruitful
connections to current educational thinking. Readers may, or may not,
like to follow those leads. In the UK, where new university lecturers
will soon be required to gain a teaching qualification, the need may be
most pressing. We hope that the book will at least get them started –
and from a basis in the discipline.

The first three chapters are designed to act as an introduction,

especially for those who are beginning or relatively new teachers of
Literature. There we ‘show’ as well as tell, demonstrating a close-

Teaching & Learning English Literature

reading seminar class and (on the book’s website) a tutorial on an
approach to teaching literary theory and criticism. We also discuss
approaches to teaching essay writing, specifically via the writing
workshop. And so we explore some of the main ‘problems’ involved
in teaching Literature (teaching close reading, theory and writing)
while also demonstrating some of Literature’s main teaching methods
(the seminar, tutorial and workshop).

Thereafter, we hope that the book’s appeal is broader. Chapter 4

onwards takes the reader from planning the curriculum and courses
in Literature, through a range of modern teaching-learning methods,
to the issues surrounding student assessment – and finally, in Chapter
7, to evaluation of our work and performance as teachers. This whole
planning process, perhaps presented somewhat seamlessly, is in
reality messier. But, nonetheless, we trust that discussion of it raises
some important issues for teachers, illuminated by the sample course
outlines (including essay and exam questions) and assessment regimes
presented on the book’s website.

These example courses and regimes are drawn mainly from practice

in the UK (although readers may use the web addresses offered in the
Bibliography and Appendix 7 on the website to access literature course
models from Australia and North America). This emphasis reflects the
fact that, in the UK, the government and its agencies now make certain
demands of teachers of all disciplines. For example, the UK Quality
Assurance Agency requires that teachers in higher education should
stipulate certain demonstrable ‘outcomes’ of their programmes, as
regards the students’ content knowledge and skills, to specified
standards. And we demonstrate in the book that similar accountability
and quality assurance measures are being introduced elsewhere.
Looking at the situation in the UK – the ‘worst case’, as it were – is
therefore instructive all round.

But, in addition to this, some educators are becoming involved in

what is now termed a ‘scholarship of teaching’ (discussed in Chapter
7) – incorporating new media in their teaching, taking a more
systematic interest in what goes on in the classroom or online and in
their students’ learning, asking questions about what they do and
why. For them teaching is becoming less a job and more an intellectual
activity worthy of serious consideration and investigation. This might
just put an end to what George Levine (2001: 7) describes as ‘the split
between our work as teachers and our work as scholars’. Although he
acknowledges that at present ‘within the scholarly universe of the

Introduction

profession, knowledge about teaching does not for the most part count
as ‘knowledge’ ’, he goes on to say:

Teaching literature is a subject, and a difficult one. Doing it well requires
scholarly and critical sophistication, but it also requires a clear idea of
what literature is, of what is entailed in reading and criticizing it. It
requires, in fact, some very self-conscious theorizing. But beyond the
questions that ought to feed any serious critic’s sense of what doing
literature might mean, there are questions about the relation between
such sophistication and the necessities of the classroom: what, how, and
when are students most likely to learn?

(Levine, 2001: 14)

If this book helps to stimulate such questioning among literature
teachers, its authors will be well pleased.

Teaching & Learning English Literature

The discipline today

N CRISIS

Culture wars

No Literature academic, long established or just beginning, can be
unaffected by the ‘culture wars’ that in the last two decades or so have
ravaged our scholarly community, and indeed the Humanities gen-
erally. Western governments’ neglect of the Humanities, even to the
point of repudiation, and their concurrent outpourings of resource for
research and teaching in the so-called productive areas of the higher
education curriculum – business, technology, the applied sciences –
undoubtedly galvanised many humanists, but in ways that commen-
tators (especially in North America)

have identified as an aspect of

‘the crisis’ itself. That is, in such a situation of dwindling resource for
the discipline and perceived loss of its status within the academy,
colleagues tended to turn on each other

in culture wars and canon wars that feature campus radicals versus
conservative publicists, proponents of multiculturalism versus defenders
of tradition, scholars who insist on the political construction of all
knowledge versus those who would preserve the purity and beauty of a
necessarily nonpolitical, because objective, truth.

(Scott, 1995: 293)

And these activists, in both traditionalist and radical camps, joined in
(always justified?) scorn of their more utilitarian, entrepreneurial
colleagues who, then and now, would ‘sell’ their services within the
favoured, well-resourced domains – offering courses in medical ethics,
for example, or communications for business managers, or in logical
thinking, problem-solving and other so-called generic and transferable
skills – for either their compliance or their debasement of a once-
precious coinage.

‘Marketing’ higher education

Meanwhile, many of us look on in perplexity, fearing the worst as
humanities departments continue to be merged or axed, faculty
numbers and class-contact hours cut and our once coherent curricula
reduced to short modules which students pick and mix like outfits
from the shopping mall. At the same time, we are exhorted to
introduce ‘flexible’ learning methods to cope with periodic bouts of
expansion in student numbers (video-taped lectures, virtual seminars
via computer conferencing), and to focus increasingly on our students’
employability and acquisition of related skills. Insult adds to injury
when such ‘developments’ are held up as progressive: as the elements
of an architecture of client-centred Lifelong Learning, or some sim-
ilarly opaque assertion our education has taught us to question and
fully equipped us to demolish. For many academics in the Humanities,
and perhaps especially in literary studies, vehemently reject such a
retail model of higher education – a model in which every institution’s
first concern is to keep the paying customers coming through the door,
and teachers are the floor clerks who keep those customers happy.

However, it’s not all gloom and doom. It is clear that the appren-

ticeship model of higher education – in which disciplines are ‘tribes’,
with their different, clearly marked out, well defended ‘territories’
(Becher and Trowler, 2001) and their academics busy training the next
generation of scholars – is giving way under the pressures of national
and international competition and of students’ buying power to looser
curriculum formations and an economy that is demand- as well as
supply-led. These are shifts of emphasis that many in the academy
welcome. And they may simply be inevitable in the situation of
widening access to higher education in the age of the Internet (see
Edwards and Usher, 2001). The main danger is of course a dumbing
down of higher education generally, as newspaper headlines about
Mickey Mouse courses attest (especially in some of the newer fields,
such as Media Studies) and as many academics themselves fear. In this
connection, we would just point to the widely acknowledged high
academic standards of the UK Open University, which since 1969 has
successfully offered a modular programme predicated on the widest
possible choice to adult students who need have no previous educa-
tional qualifications at all. Dumbing down is a danger, then, but it is
not inevitable.

Teaching & Learning English Literature

Understanding global forces

And, at least, humanities disciplines are not alone in all this. Indeed,
it is now widely accepted that there is ‘a global crisis of rising demand
for higher education which races ahead of the public funding to meet
it’ (Channon, 2000: 255, citing Goddard). We may conclude that, after
all, the ‘crisis’ of the Humanities reflects an infrastructural crisis in all
higher education, even if humanities disciplines perhaps come off
worst. Furthermore, if (with Bourdieu, 1988) we first distinguish
between the cognitive and the social structures of the disciplines –
their academic (knowledge/actively intellectual) and their social
(power/socially reproductive) dimensions – and, second, identify
some disciplines as clearly located at the cognitive end of the spectrum
(e.g. natural science) with others (such as business studies) at the
social/temporal end, we may then locate the Humanities towards the
cognitive end, in a state of some tension between the poles. This
analytical framework (which, note, does not entail judgements of
disciplinary value) can help make sense of the bewildering array of
forces currently acting upon higher education and its effects. For the
world-wide trend towards mass higher education systems is a
phenomenon that emphasises the social/temporal dimension of all
disciplines (Kelly, 2001) – an emphasis that is likely to have especially
distorting effects on those disciplines located towards the cognitive
end of the spectrum.

That is, as ever-larger numbers of students enter higher education

systems, these systems – yoked as they are to the economic demands
of an ever more global marketplace – are increasingly geared to the
students’ future employment and capacity to contribute to national
wealth. A major aim of a higher education, then, is that students
should acquire marketable skills. In the UK, for example, these skills
are to be demonstrated by the students’ competent performance of the
‘learning outcomes’ that their teachers must stipulate for them in
advance – with teachers’ own performance measured accordingly and
controlled for ‘quality’. Thus we all become constrained to think about
our teaching goals and methods in similar terms, whether our field is
Biology or Business or Literature. It is as if, when it comes to teaching,
the structure, purposes and pedagogy of all disciplines were one and
the same. And it is as if students themselves may have no educational
goals or preferences of their own.

The discipline today

Truce and federation

While the particular tensions such constraints give rise to will of
course differ within and among humanities as well as other disci-
plines, we should try to understand our own situation in a way that
inspires something more productive than either panic or paralysis.
With respect to Modern Languages, Kelly’s solution to avoiding
disciplinary fracture and marginalisation – to achieving both the social
unity needed to address issues of power and the cognitive diversity
required to create new knowledge – is ‘federation’: large departments
or units that may ‘speak with one voice’, acting on behalf of all their
members and, at the same time, fostering and sustaining a wide range
of intellectual interests (Kelly, 2001: 55). If the situation of Modern
Languages is in its essentials representative of other humanities then
might not such a notion of federation profitably be extended to the
Humanities as a whole, including Literature? Clearly, this would entail
a truce in the culture wars and a genuine coming together to forge new
understandings.

Indeed, it seems that the worst of the conflict is behind us now

(Gregory, 2002). A recent contribution to the debate from another
American academic, who was a student at the height of the culture
wars (Insko, 2003), suggests teaching for democratic citizenship as
a way forward, while Gregory himself (2001: 87) recommends the
‘humanization of the social order’; Bérubé (2003) promotes ways of
valuing the ‘utility’ of cultural work; Gerald Graff (2003), by ‘teaching
the conflicts’, suggests yet another possibility. And evidence that there
is a will to forge new understandings emerging widely in the
Humanities came our way in response to a proposal in 2001 to
establish an academic journal of Arts and Humanities higher educa-
tion (Arts and Humanities in Higher Education: An International Journal of
Theory, Research and Practice, Sage Journals (www.sagepub.co.uk)).
Variously, the (anonymous) international respondents pointed to the
need:

. . . for a potential rallying-point for the politics of those dedicated to a
remarkably resilient yet systematically slighted area of education. We
don’t get the big grants . . . but we do get the students, and the interest
. . . we’re big education providers/cultivators for post-industrial societies.
After all, by and large, we insist on education (not training alone), and
flexibility and adaptability (not narrow vocationalism).

Teaching & Learning English Literature

. . . for ways to cut the humanities coat according to the shrinking cloth
on the one hand, developing arguments that may at least have some
potential to reverse this trend on the other.

. . . genuinely to bring together top-level thought on research-led
pedagogy across humanities disciplines, which strengthens links between
those disciplines without denying their separate identities.

However, as we have seen, certain indicators are plain discouraging.
Internally, some humanities disciplines are deeply fractured, perhaps
especially Literature. It appears that within the Humanities generally
there exists little agreement about desirable purposes, curricula and
teaching practices – partly as a consequence of differences in response
to the external pressures just noted, and also owing to different
underlying conceptions of the disciplines themselves (see Chambers
(2001) for discussion of traditional, radical and utilitarian views of
Literature as a discipline). In starting this book with such sobering
reflections we recognise no more than is true and no more than
beginning academics will indeed encounter. It is because of this
backdrop that what we say in it has urgency. And of course through
the book we aim to point up the distinctiveness of our discipline, and
to help achieve the kind of unity of purpose and understanding that
will sustain its vitality.

Disciplinary vigour

In any case, we must not lose our nerve. Literature courses have
traditionally attracted large numbers of students and they continue to
do so. In spite of the difficulties involved when resources for teaching
are far from commensurate, what this means is that many people
actually want to study Literature. If they didn’t, the discipline’s ‘crisis’
would more likely be the discipline’s demise. And these people we now
see in our classrooms (or, in a mode such as distance education, perhaps
don’t see at all) could hardly be more heterogeneous: of all ages, and
social and ethnic backgrounds; with a range of previous experience of
education and of qualifications from virtually nil to standard higher
education entry requirements and beyond. In the UK, a series of
assessment visits made in 1994–5 to 72 per cent of university English
departments revealed that in over a third of the departments ‘the
quality of education was judged to be excellent’ (and of the remainder,
to be satisfactory in all but three cases). The assessors continue:

The discipline today

Excellence was identified across a variety of programmes, institutions,
approaches to subject delivery and assessments of the curriculum.
Positive features included: vigour in the curriculum; success in attract-
ing capable, enthusiastic students; widening of access – particularly to
mature, returning students – without any diminution in quality; high
retention rates; student achievement that in general reflects considerable
intellectual challenge . . .; positive views held by past and present
students about the quality of their learning experience; and excellent
staff–student relations.

(QAA, Subject Overview Report – English, 1995;

Summary: at www.qaa.ac.uk – accessed March 2004)

So there is much that is encouraging.

It remains to be seen why students might want to study Literature

and just what kind of education it is that they want or expect. But first
we step back a bit, to consider where we’re ‘coming from’. Given the
focus of the book, our starting point is of course pedagogy.

ROM ANCIENT PEDAGOGY . . .

Traditional pedagogy in literature classes has its roots in the ancient
pedagogy of classical language instruction. This was a pedagogy
aimed mostly at students ‘getting it right’. The beginning stages of
Latin and Greek do not provide occasions for student ‘interpretation’;
students can’t have independent opinions about semantics, syntax,
tenses, inflections and the like. Thus, the very pedagogy that is so
much maligned today – students mimicking and parroting their
teachers’ knowledge and injunctions – was the pedagogy that for
centuries was successful in beginning Latin and Greek classes. Once
beyond the beginning stages, the content of classics classrooms was of
course not language as such, but Greek and Latin philosophy and
literature (Horace, Cicero, Seneca, Homer, Sophocles, Plato, Thucyd-
ides, Aristotle), and in translating these complex and nuanced texts
questions of interpretation and judgement would increasingly come to
the fore. Nonetheless, these roots in the pedagogy of Greek and Latin
instruction partly explain why, historically, literature pedagogy of a
‘top-down’ kind has had so much momentum and why it has taken so
long to alter or modify it.

Teaching & Learning English Literature

Literature pedagogy

When Classics and Literature finally went their separate disciplinary
ways, and literature teaching was mounted on the platform of
students’ own language rather than difficult and dead ‘foreign’
languages, the pedagogy of Literature could be loosened considerably.
The issue in reading literature was no longer tied to students ‘getting
it right’ as a matter of necessity. They could be encouraged to develop
their own interpretive opinions. However, the magisterial rightness as
represented by the teacher was a strongly entrenched tradition in the
academy and did not immediately melt away. Throughout the latter
part of the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, students in
literature classes were still taught as if their job was to ‘get it right’, if
not tenses and inflection then interpretations and meanings. The right
interpretations and meanings came not from student thought, inquiry
or questioning, and certainly not from student ‘opinion’, which most
teachers until recently (and some still, if truth be told) viewed in
quotation marks, but from the instructor. ‘Right opinion’ was what the
teacher thought. Today, given the challenges the discipline faces, there
is even more reason willingly and imaginatively to jump outside the
authoritarian frame that teachers and students may sometimes still
inhabit.

Perhaps, therefore, the most helpful thing we might say about

pedagogy at this early stage of the book is to recommend not this or
that ‘local’ strategy, such as ‘do seminars, not lectures’ or ‘do
workshops, not seminars’, but to discuss a ‘global’ approach designed
to help teachers help students think more deeply than they might
about the possible uses and value of literary study. Later, in Chapter
5, we discuss such local teaching strategies as lectures, seminars and
so on, but, for now, we’ll explore some ideas that may help teachers
acquaint students with a deeper sense not of how to do literary study,
but why do it at all.

In what follows we want to explore three sets of ideas. First, we

want to investigate what kinds of connection students can make with
literary works that contribute to their overall education, to the
development of their minds and knowledge. Second, we want to
suggest that the framing action of pedagogy is a more important
variable in students’ learning than teachers often think. Third, we
want to describe in outline a particular pedagogical approach that
helps students make a personal and educational connection with

The discipline today

literary works: a pedagogic framework that is ‘ancient’ in the sense of
enduring, and enduringly human.

Student connections: connected students

The kinds of connection that many students want to make to the
literature they study can be called, for lack of a better term, existential,
that is connections between literature on the one hand, and the basic,
enduring terms and conditions of human existence on the other. A line
of iambic pentameter in a Shakespeare play or a Keats sonnet may be
a thing of beauty forever, but it may not seem so, initially at least, to
an 18-year-old freshman or to a 35-year-old adult returning to
education in the midst of pressures from employment or parenthood.
For both of these students, as different as their circumstances may be,
the invitation from a literature teacher who – perhaps kindly, but
sometimes cluelessly – thinks her or his own enthusiasm for the
technicalities of literature should generate similar enthusiasm in the
student, winds up convincing both the 18 year old and the 35 year old
of literature’s irrelevance to the reality of their everyday lives. Such
teacherly enthusiasm is often a bit myopic: what the teacher finds
interesting may be a very small blip on any student’s radar screen.
Teachers need more than their own interests and enthusiasms in order
to make a case to students for the value of literary study.

One way to make such a case is to provide a pedagogical frame for

literary instruction drawn from conditions that affect all students
because they affect all human beings. These conditions include but are
not exhausted by: the need for growth, doubts and fears about success,
the need for affiliation with others, the unavoidability of dealing with
families, the need for friends and companions, the uncertainty of luck,
the commonality of the physical senses, the frailty of the flesh, the
certainty of loss and grief, the inevitability of death.

The human condition

It is of course very difficult to get contemporary students raised on TV
and the literary equivalent of Pop-Tarts to feel any sort of personal
connection with the strange behaviour, values and language of such
literary artists and moralistic thinkers as the Beowulf poet, Chaucer,
Milton, Swift, Pope and Samuel Johnson. And much talk about the
benefits of education seems premised on the shallow assumption that
students’ only interests in it are material and financial. But we all

Teaching & Learning English Literature

know that life’s most fundamental conditions have little to do with
money and are not generally solved by money. How does money solve
the problems of grief, sickness, loss, rejection, disappointment?

Novels and poems don’t solve those problems either, of course, not

in any direct way – literary study is not a form of therapy; rather, as
Sidney says, it is a form of learning – but it is the case that novels and
poems address the griefs and losses of life and, in the means and
manner of that address, offer literature students a wide array of
stances, attitudes, concepts, insights, subtleties, ethical deliberations
and both practical and intellectual remedies that they may adopt or
store up for future consideration and possible use. Life for no one
comes with a ‘how-to’ manual – nor is a destiny programmed into
one’s DNA – and, in the absence of both explicit external instructions
and internal determiners, human beings have developed many stra-
tegies to help them sort out life’s conundrums, to impose patterned
meaning on the chaotic data of experience and to help them interpret
or create the meanings of things. Science, religion, history, art, social
sciences, games and legal systems all qualify as such strategies, but the
most comprehensive and ubiquitous of all human strategies for both
finding and creating meaning is the telling and consuming of stories.
Hence the existential importance of literary study.

Relevance

Of course it is good for students to have stable, high-paying jobs –
literature teachers these days may wish their own jobs were more
stable and high paying – but having a good job does not absolve
anyone from facing certain conditions of life common to human beings
as such, regardless of income. It is humanity’s universal set of
conditions that literary study can help students face, and it is to this
set of conditions that students refer when they ask their teachers about
the relevance of literary study. If teachers cannot answer the question
‘Why do we have to read this stuff?’ with something more substantive
than ‘Because it’s required’ then we do little to counter the bean
counters of the world who view literary study as a mere trifle, an
anomalous deviation from the bottom line. Thus the concern to help
students connect with literature.

However, teachers cannot forcibly create those connections. Nor is

it helpful for teachers to rely on exhortation. Telling students they
must like the literature of Milton and Johnson because it is, by God,

The discipline today

good for them and implying that they’d better buy the teacher’s literary
goods or else, is merely a way of teachers losing their own focus and
forfeiting their students’ trust. Such bullying claims – seldom meant
as bullying by well-intentioned teachers, to be sure, but sometimes
seen in this light by students nevertheless – are not only ineffective but
are usually false. They are false in the sense that the world does not
operate this way. Many people who are not dolts know nothing at all
about Milton or Johnson. More importantly, perhaps, such claims do
not invite learning but sound like threats. Teachers need to remember
that there is a big difference between a thing being interesting and a
thing being important, especially to students; a difference that some
teachers conflate as they innocently assume, prima facie, that what is
interesting to them is also – or even therefore – important to their
students.

Literary pedagogy and liberal education

The difference that students are likely to see between important and
interesting throws light on the significance of pedagogical frames. What
most students make out of the texts they read, literary or non-literary, is
not what they make out of them on their own but what they are invited
and, indeed, led to make out of them by the pedagogical guidance of
their teachers. In literary studies, of course, this pedagogy encourages
contributions from fellow students in seminars and through collab-
orative assignments, among other things. We do not intend to suggest
that students learn only from their teachers, who transmit their
knowledge and understanding seamlessly, but we do mean to be clear
that nonetheless it is teachers who provide the framing pedagogy: that
this is their job. Pedagogy frames course content and different frames
invite different kinds of understanding of content.

Intellectual and personal development

Teachers of Literature have many specific disciplinary and cognitive
goals, but their most general, foundational, goals are developmental.
Through education, we want our students to grow intellectually, to
mature personally, to develop socially and to become more sophisti-
cated emotionally. We are not talking here about an educational
perspective suitable only (or even mainly) for young students. All of
us – whether adults out in the world, young people just beginning
higher education or people returning to school after years away from

Teaching & Learning English Literature

the classroom – all of us have room in our lives to grow in these ways.
Some adults returning to education may be much more mature in
these respects than 18-year-olds, but all teachers who commonly teach
adults know that those who return to education after years on the job
very often hold goals of personal and intellectual development, along
with their goals of financial advancement, even more steadfastly than
their younger counterparts. What these adults have learned while out
in the world is precisely the importance of personal development, not
just as an employee on a job but as a human being dealing with the
exigencies of living.

Affective engagement

But these are general teaching objectives. What do literature teachers
want in particular? It seems to us that the overarching effect most
literature teachers want is for their students to experience the same
kind of exciting involvement with literature that they felt as students:
namely vicarious identification and emotional transport. Those stu-
dents who have not thought much beyond the employment benefits of
higher education may have few conscious thoughts about this educa-
tional aim. But, when vicarious identification and transport do indeed
occur, it is transparently clear to both students and teachers that such
moments constitute the best moments of students’ education. They
may seldom ask for this experience because they may have no idea
that it is available to them, but once they experience it they never ask
for a refund on the grounds that it doesn’t promise to increase their
income. They ask instead for second helpings. Just like athletes playing
their games, musicians playing their instruments or philosophers
playing with their arguments, students do not feel that the learning
that intensifies and enlarges their sense of life and sense of self needs
further justification. These experiences can suddenly open a window
on life through which a reader learns to see the world in new ways or,
in many cases, learns to see new worlds altogether. This is the kind of
education most literature teachers received when they first read
Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen – and this is probably why, in
the end, they became teachers of literature. One can enjoy this sort of
thing in private for a lifetime. To decide that you want to teach
literature must mean that the special adventures of mind and spirit
offered by literary study are adventures that you want to share with
others, not merely possess on your own.

The discipline today

A literary example that not only creates this experience but that talks

about it is the poem the 21-year-old John Keats wrote to his teacher,
Charles Cowden Clark, after the two of them stayed up all night
reading George Chapman’s translation of Homer. In this well-known
sonnet, Keats uses two metaphors of the reader: the reader as an
explorer of distant lands and the reader as an astronomer who has just
discovered a new planet in the heavens. He expresses amazement that
such transport is available to human beings, amazement at its beauty,
amazement at its significance and amazement that it could take one’s
imagination so far. The importance of Keats’s lines for us as teachers
– not as literary critics or scholars of Romanticism but as teachers – is
that Keats’s feelings of transport exemplify what every student of
literature most desires, even if he or she cannot say it. Students want
this because we all want this. That is, we want to be taken places in
our imagination and feelings that make life seem fresh, bracing and
important. Sometimes it is one thing that can do this for us, sometimes
another.

Narrative power

But vicarious identification and emotional transport are neither limited
to nor solely defined by literary experience. Who can doubt that the
success of narratives in the mass media is rooted in the power of
stories to take us out of ourselves, to help us define what is important,
to help us identify our longings and desires, and to help us achieve a
sense of the intensity and vividness of life? For the purposes of this
present argument, it does not much matter that many critics blast the
mass media for offering only an ersatz vividness and a fake intensity;
the point here is that whether or not the identification and transport
offered by mass media are good for us or bad for us, they happen, and,
as the term ‘mass media’ asserts, they happen on a massive social scale
and go on constantly. Anyone in our contemporary world can go
through a whole life avoiding the poems of Pope and the tales of
Chaucer, but no one can go five minutes without running into the
products of mass media: songs, political ads and DJ patter on the
radio, dramas and sitcoms and commercials on TV, billboards in our
faces, movies in our malls, newspaper headlines on our doorsteps and
running like electronic banners around public buildings. Pop songs are
constantly making claims about the most intense forms of love, TV
games are constantly hooking us with images of human desire and

Teaching & Learning English Literature

achievement, movies are constantly enticing us to assent to everything
from worlds we can hardly imagine to encounters with people who
look like engaging versions of our neighbours.

The contents of vicarious identification and emotional transport

offered by literature differ – often but not always – from that offered
to us by mass media, but the psychology of the phenomenon is the
same in all these cases. It is an eagerness to go outside of ourselves, to
find out who we are by triangulating our experience with that of
others, and to feel that we are a part of something larger than our own
solitary existence. Literary travelling consistently and persistently
achieves such identification and transport across generations, races,
ethnicities, genders, classes and cultures. There have never been any
non-storytelling cultures. Only human beings tell stories but all human
beings tell stories (Gregory, 1995).

Literary experience and learning

To teachers, the desire to help students discover this sense of literary
enlargement is not based on its entertainment value for them or its ego
gratification for us. Few teachers are such purists that they think any
entertaining class is sordid or cheap, nor are they so selfless that ego
never plays a role in the desire to be a good teacher. However, most
teachers do not want merely to entertain or merely receive on their
course evaluation forms such dubious compliments as ‘You made
tragedy seem very enjoyable’. Most teachers can easily tolerate failure
to make the death of Hamlet enjoyable, but what they cannot tolerate
is for their students to miss out on the contribution that literary study
makes to their liberal education, to the growth of mind, enlargement
of self and the complication of feelings and judgement that constitute
intellectual growth and personal maturation. As much as teachers tend
to value literary experience for its own sake, they do not value it – for
themselves or for their students – if ‘its own sake’ means supposing
that it exists, or could exist, apart from the everyday lives in which
human beings laugh, suffer, fear, love and die.

It has been difficult since at least the heyday of New Criticism to

speak about literary experience as an important form of human
learning. If literature is said to be all aesthetic strategies of unity, as
the New Critics insisted, or if it is all textual indeterminacy, as the
Derridians insist, or if it is just the automatic recycling of hegemonic
master scripts, as the Foucauldians insist, or if it’s just the inevitable

The discipline today

excrescence of cultural and economic forces, as the New Historicists
insist, or if it’s merely a set of cues that prompt readers to rewrite each
text in the reader’s own image, as some of the reader-response critics
insist, then there is not much learning to be acquired from literary
study. But it has never been the case that the kind of human learning
that lies at the heart of literary experience exists in an either/or
relationship with postmodern views that in effect depreciate it.
Literature is both aesthetic strategies and human learning, both
textually slippery and textually determinate, both master-scripted and
a critique of master scripts. But most of all it is learning.

Through the looking glass

For example, when teachers and their students read the ‘Pardoner’s
Prologue’ and the ‘Pardoner’s Tale’ together, they learn something
about the practices of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages; they
learn something about enduring human vices such as avarice, hypoc-
risy, deceit, passion and pride; they learn something about acts of
language such as irony, hyperbole, metaphor and rhetoric; and they
learn something about the moral criteria by which people like the
Pardoner can be judged. As teachers and students surf their way
through literary periods and genres, they find many human types
different from the Pardoner – the misers, the lechers, the ambitious, the
nitwits and so on – and likewise find many situations (comic, tragic,
satiric, political, racial . . .) which differ greatly from the types of
people and situations they encounter in their everyday life. Thus
everyone’s involvement with literary representations of what is
strange and unfamiliar educates us about how the worlds on the other
side of the looking glass might feel and look, what importance such
worlds may have and how the people who live in those worlds may
evaluate their own ends and methods of living. There is no way
anyone can claim that this is not really learning, or that such learning
does not enter into the life blood of anyone’s everyday existence.

Literature undoubtedly encompasses not only the most comprehen-

sive survey of the massive range of human types and situations to be
found on the other side of the looking glass, but embodies this survey
in concrete representations that actually invite its readers to assume,
through the vicarious imagination, modes of living, feeling and
judging that they may otherwise never learn about at all. This is
exactly the process that defines a liberal arts education: a process that
invites students to perform two significant acts of self-development.

Teaching & Learning English Literature

First, it invites students to work explicitly on the development of basic
human capacities such as language, reason, imagination, introspection,
moral and ethical deliberation, sociability, aesthetic responsiveness,
physical embodiment and so on: capacities that are fundamental to
self-understanding in relation to others. Second, a liberal education
invites students to avail themselves of the resources of their culture,
as embodied in such traditions of research and knowledge as the arts
and sciences, in order to gain that perspective on their own lives
without which one finds it nearly impossible ever to leave the home
base of ego. Never leaving the home base of ego presents a great
obstacle to ever gaining any rich sense that one’s own biography, one’s
own circumstances, one’s own communities and one’s own views are
not the centre of the universe.

A framing pedagogy: existential ‘sidebar’ issues

One effective strategy for helping students engage with literary study
in existential terms is to develop in class at the beginning of the course
a set of sidebar topics which, for lack of a better term, one could call
‘existential issues’. These sidebar issues can be developed during the
whole semester or course. Their value consists of the assistance they
give students in finding their own grounds for deciding that Chaucer
and Shakespeare and Milton might possess a surprising relevance
even in the age of I-Max theatres, rap music, gourmet pizzas, the
World Wide Web, Nike sports shoes and the Hubble telescope.

Human physicality

The sidebar topics that we call existential issues refer to those
universal conditions of the human experience encountered by all
human beings in all times and in all cultures, regardless of their
gender, class, race or ethnicity. To begin with, there are the universal
facts of human physicality that provide the grounds of common
transcultural experience. These include such obvious and common
physical facts, for example, as bipedalism, binocular vision, colour
perception, prehensile thumbs, male fertilisation, female gestation,
sexual intercourse, physical pain, physical pleasure, eating, eliminat-
ing, getting sick, ageing, dying and the common human senses of
smelling, touching, tasting, hearing, and seeing.

At one level it seems simple-minded to remind everyone of these

facts of human physicality, yet much of human experience just is

The discipline today

grounded in the universal physical facts of tasting and touching,
eating and eliminating, grasping and walking, feeling healthy and
getting sick, procreating and dying. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson,
in fact, in their book Philosophy in the Flesh, go so far as to argue that
the universal properties of the body are the basis of human concep-
tuality. This is not the place to recapitulate their whole argument, but
their central thesis is both provocative and relevant to teachers who
are interested in thinking about a pedagogy that links literary study
with existential issues.

Think of the properties of the human body that contribute to the
peculiarities of our conceptual system. We have eyes and ears, arms and
legs that work in certain very definite ways and not in others. We have
a visual system, with topographic maps and orientation-sensitive cells,
that provides structure for our ability to conceptualize spatial relations.
Our abilities to move in the ways we do and to track the motion of other
things give motion a major role in our conceptual system. The fact that
we have muscles and use them to apply force in certain ways leads to
the structure of our system of causal concepts. What is important is not
just that we have bodies and that thought is somehow embodied. What
is important is that the peculiar nature of our bodies shapes our very
possibilities for conceptualization and categorization.

(Lakoff and Johnson, 1999: 18–19)

Multiculturalism

It is precisely the universality of these experiences that creates much
of literature’s transcultural power. If difference really were the whole
story about human groups and individuals, how could anyone love,
respect, be educated or moved by stories of people in other lands, in
other cultures or of other races and gender? But nothing is more
common than that such ties are felt by readers every day (not to
mention music lovers and movie watchers). If the differentness of the
Other were indeed absolute – if difference were always already
‘uncapturable’ difference – then multiculturalism would be nothing
but the delusory reach for an impossibility. Multiculturalism, in order
to have a programme, demands the transcultural accessibility of
common human experiences, many of them grounded in the fact that
all human beings share the same bodies.

Reflecting on human physicality shows us how deeply our connec-

tedness with all other human beings lies, for not only do all human

Teaching & Learning English Literature

beings everywhere and anytime live under the domination of these
physical facts, but all human beings prefer some versions of these facts to
others. All of us – regardless of gender or race, culture or era – prefer
to be well rather than sick, prefer to be mobile rather than paralysed,
prefer taste to the deprivation of taste, prefer to feel pleasure rather
than pain, prefer to eliminate rather than be incapacitated for it, prefer
sight to blindness, and so on. Even those who deliberately choose
some negative version of one of these pairs – as monks choose not to
procreate, for example, or as some swamis may choose immobility –
do so for special reasons that they by no means construe as norms for
all humanity. After all, if everyone did what swamis do then there
would be no point in swamis doing it.

Human sociability

Even more important to us as teachers than the sidebar issues of
human physicality, however, are the existential issues deriving from
human sociability: the fact that living with other human beings is a
universal reality for everyone in all times, places and conditions. None
of us – with no ethnic, gender, race or class exceptions – can become
human at all, much less flourish, except in the company and
conversation and caring of other human beings. The existential issues
created by universal facts of human sociability include but are not
limited to:

companionship (the need for it, the pleasures and annoyances and
betrayals of it, the grief over loss of companions, sexual compan-
ionship, and so on);

familial relations (the need for families, the complex dynamics of
them, the primal pull of family loyalty, the grief over loss of
family connections, and so on);

moral criteria (there are no societies devoid of moral criteria for
defining such features of life and conduct as goodness/badness,
success/failure, cowardice/bravery, wisdom/foolishness, loyalty/
betrayal, just/unjust, fair/unfair, and so on);

views about the origins and meaning of life (views about what
human beings are for, where they came from, what their basic
nature and destiny are, and so on);

views about death (whether death is a punishment, a stage of life,
an absolute termination, a passage to some sort of continued,
non-physical existence, and so on);

The discipline today

views about religion (there are no societies devoid of religious
beliefs and believers; even non-religious persons have to define
their secularity against prevailing religious beliefs);

experience of art (there are no societies devoid of art and artists
and no individuals who can evade their society’s forms of artistic
representation and manipulations of graphic, architectural, repre-
sentational or ornamental design); and finally

stories (there are no societies devoid of stories and storytellers and
no individuals who do not negotiate at least in part, often large
part, a sense of self, reality, the nature of others, and the operation
of the world with the representations of just these very things in
stories).

Calling these realities ‘truths’ and emphasising their universality is
descriptive, not normative. They are simply empirically true descrip-
tions of certain facts about human existence in all times and places.
Among other things, what teachers value about these truths for their
students is their power to help students separate the trivial from the
serious in human experience. That is also what they value about these
truths. Regardless of their age or social background, all students today
live in a world composed so thoroughly of superficial images, and
they are so much aware that these images are designed to manipulate
them by making them buy certain products or by making them believe
someone’s self-interested ‘spin’ on ideas, and they are so influenced by
the image of ‘cool’ from television shows such as the late-departed
Seinfeld and Friends, that some of them have a hard time identifying a
truly serious human issue grounded in a universal, existential fact.

Literary invitations

All of us mere human beings have instincts for grasping serious issues,
but none of us receives much help from our culture in developing
those instincts. Yet even amidst the linguistic thickets of unfamiliar
reading, when students encounter Shakespeare’s Sonnet No. 73 about
‘That time of year thou mayst in me behold/When yellow leaves, or
none, or few, do hang/Upon those boughs which shake against the
cold,/Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang’, or when
they read Milton’s sonnet about going blind at age 43, or when they
read the final sentence of Johnson’s Preface to his great dictionary in
which he says that his work has been protracted until all the people

Teaching & Learning English Literature

he wished to please with it are dead and that other people’s
judgements of his success or failure are meaningless to him, then even
young and immature students know they are in the presence of serious
and permanent issues that describe the human condition. Older
students often feel the importance of these issues even more keenly
because they have more personal experience that resonates with them.
But young and old alike – all of us in whatever conditions –
are equally vulnerable to grief, to the loss of companions, to the need
for courage, and to the certainty of death.

Far from being depressed by considering these grimmer facts of life

as probed by literature, students seem braced by them; a little sobered,
perhaps, when in the presence of writers who confront these facts
without employing the euphemisms we are all used to in popular
culture, but glad nevertheless to have their chance to face at least
vicariously the circumstances they know all human beings face.

Literary travel

So what does all of this have to do with our students and Keats’s
travelling in the realms of gold and feeling like ‘stout Cortez’, ‘visiting
a peak in Darien’? Everything. The shock of discovery when students
find that they are not alone in their feelings, anxieties and thoughts;
when they discover that even long-deceased divines such as John
Donne know about sexual passion, romance and love; when they
discover that even quiet college dons such as Thomas Gray know
about the anxieties of young people who wonder if they will ever meet
their own expectations of themselves; when they discover that a
deeply religious person such as Sir Thomas More can envision a
society better than ours even without religion; and when they discover
that even the erudite and lofty Samuel Johnson can feel absolutely
bereft upon the death of his poor dependant and good friend, Robert
Levet: all this discovery is like travelling in foreign lands. It helps
students gain a better understanding of their own circumstances
through the study of others’ circumstances. As C. S. Lewis’s most
troublesome student in the movie, Shadowlands, says, ‘we read to learn
that we are not alone’, and for those of us who wonder sometimes if
our own interior lives are so idiosyncratic that no one else could ever
understand them, an education in literature provides the supplement-
ary knowledge – supplementary to life itself – that there is, indeed,
nothing new under the sun, no human circumstance that has not been
faced by someone, somewhere, and that despite the real possibility of

The discipline today

failure and defeat in life, good luck and victory are also possible. To
study literature from the perspective of existential issues makes it live
for students of all ages and circumstances.

If as teachers we can help students discover not just that a sonnet

has 14 lines with a particular rhyme scheme and metre, but that these
formal features of the sonnet are vehicles for a set of invitations – to
feel in new ways, to see in new ways, to think in new ways and to
judge in new ways – then we are helping students learn to combine
their technical knowledge and the circumstances of their lives. To
encounter the elemental realities of the human condition in literature
can indeed, as Keats says of reading Homer, strike one dumb with awe
and gratification, feelings which Keats captures in the image of
stunned amazement on the faces of the first Europeans, looking out on
the vastness of the Pacific Ocean.

Literary techniques

The reference to ‘technical knowledge’ raises one last issue that will
close this discussion. All the talk about teaching and learning literature
in relation to existential issues is not meant to suggest that technical
content in literature classes is less valuable than it ever was or that it
should be given short shrift. In learning to understand the power of
literature’s probing of existential issues, it is imperative that students
also learn that this power is generated not by general and vague
authorial effusiveness, but is always generated by the specific aesthetic
and rhetorical strategies that constitute a work’s material structure: the
imagery, the diction, the tone(s), the descriptions, the characterisa-
tions, the narrative techniques, the sound values and rhythms of
language, and so on. Thus in order to know how it is that literature
can resonate with our circumstances requires that students learn the
techniques of detailed analysis.

To suggest that students acquire a deeper sense of literature’s

relevance to human life by framing the study of it with existential
perspectives is not to suggest that classes should invite general
effusiveness from students either. Both authors and students have to
learn to deal with the detailed and concrete realities of language and
expression. A trout fisherman’s beautifully hand-wrought fly is not
much use if it never catches any trout. The general purpose of both the
fly and of studying literature provides a reason to go fishing or
reading in the first place, but it is also true that within the context of
that general purpose, both fishermen and readers have to learn how

Teaching & Learning English Literature

the object before them is made of many complicated details and
sub-structures which account not only for its beauty but also for its
utility. In the absence of some account of utility and beauty no one
would ever have any reason either to fish or to read.

To reiterate, the pedagogical frame for students’ connectedness with

literature that has been our subject here is just that: a frame, the
‘sidebar’ to study. While it provides an existential context for studying
literature – constantly keeping before students why they study –
it does not and should not substitute for detailed analysis of literary
techniques. Indeed, it is perhaps this combination of Literature’s
analytical, intellectual rigour and its expressiveness and ‘connected-
ness’ that attracts so many students to study it.

And with that, on to the what of study.

. . . T

O THE MODERN ACADEMY

Despite all that has been said about the primary importance for
students of a framing, guiding pedagogy, for most academics-as-
teachers the curriculum (or ‘content’ to be taught) is a major focus of
interest, and perhaps the main focus. So that is where we pick up
again the discussion of the discipline today, nonetheless in the hope
of persuading you later (should you need it) that pedagogic consider-
ations are at least as important for teaching and that indeed, to
students, content and pedagogy are inseparable.

The academic agenda

Course provision

Here at the start of the book it will be helpful to sketch the main
contours of course provision in Literature in order to establish some
common ground and terminology.

Periods and styles. The period course, such as ‘Medieval Literature’,
‘Seventeenth Century Literature’ or ‘Victorian Literature’ – and
style-labelled courses such as ‘Romantic Poetry’, ‘Modernist
Literature’ – with a focus on close reading of a range of canonical
texts and inculcation of scholarly values, practices and skills.

Authors. The ‘single author’ and ‘major author’ course: ‘Shake-
speare’ or ‘Milton’, or courses focusing on clusters of authors such
as ‘Tennyson, Browning and Arnold’, ‘The Brontës’ Fiction’.

The discipline today

Genre(s). Courses that focus on genre – the novel, poetry, drama –
and on sub-genres such as the short story, lyric poetry, slave
narrative, and so on. Sometimes genres and periods are combined,
as in ‘The Nineteenth Century British Novel’, ‘Anti-Apartheid
Themes in South African Literature 1945–1975’, or ‘American
Short Stories of the 1950s’. Courses on comedy and tragedy also
come into this category.

Women’s writing/feminism. Courses that focus on women writers
and related issues. This is not just a matter of teaching women
authors, such as Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, Katherine Mans-
field, Nadine Gordimer or Pat Barker, but of teaching them in
ways that position their themes, characterisations and visions in
relation to women’s history, politics, social roles, etc. And women
are not the only authors studied; male writers whose attitudes and
values help clarify such issues are also read.

Themes. For example, ‘Myth, Legend and Literature’, or ‘Values in
Literature’ or ‘American Visions’. Some courses combine themes
with periods and/or genres, styles, e.g. ‘Comedy and Politics in
Restoration Drama’ or ‘Visionary Mysticism in Romantic Poetry’.

Regional literatures. Courses such as ‘South American Writers’,
‘Modern Irish Literature’, ‘Introduction to Australian Literature’
or ‘African-American Literature’. While departments rarely
appoint regional specialists, they will look to use the specialisa-
tions that faculty staff bring with them or may develop over the
years.

Postmodern issues and themes. Except for feminism, no single issue
or theme is likely to orient a course by itself but will usually be
included among a cluster of postmodern orientations, such as:
– ‘queer theory’, which holds roughly the same relation to ‘gay

power’ as ‘black power’ used to hold to the goal of integration.
Queer theory is uninterested in accommodation or ‘integration’
of gay people or gay issues in mainstream societies, but insists
on a more radical advocacy designed to change fundamentally
social structures and the content of discourse with regard to
sexual orientation. But rather than being overtly programmatic,
the rhetoric of queer theory is abstrusely theorised and often
deeply infused with postmodern notions of the slipperiness of
language or with Lacanian ideas about the subconscious;

– ‘new historicism’, which immerses literary texts within the

context of the other forms of discourse and sometimes political

Teaching & Learning English Literature

practice that characterised the historical period in which the
texts were written, such that a Shakespeare text can be claimed,
from this point of view, to be as much ‘about’, say, economics
as it is about the humanist themes that have formed the
traditional stuff of Shakespeare criticism;

– ‘Bakhtinian dialogics’, which employs the notion of the carni-

valisation of language and the tension between monologic and
dialogic forms of discourse in order to analyse a literary text’s
tendency to be open to response, or its tendency to close off
response – to have the last word, so to speak – such that the
more ‘open’ texts are usually valorised against those that are
said to be ‘closed’, ‘authoritative’ or monological;

– ‘deconstruction’ or ‘Derridean’ perspectives, which, according to the

theories of language and text proffered by Jacques Derrida, hold
that textual meaning is infinitely deferred – non-graspable in
any ordinary sense of determining stable meaning – and, rather
than offering the experience of determining what the text is
‘about’ or what it ‘means’ offers instead the experience of riding
among and through its sliding meanings, such that the reader
confronts an ever shifting perspective not of the world, but of
language itself – a language that seems to head for stable
references but is unaware of the moments and places where it
slips into contradiction and ‘deconstruction’;

– ‘Foucauldian’ and ‘Marxist’ approaches (often taken in tandem

with the literary theories of Roland Barthes and Frederick
Jameson), which challenge traditional humanistic approaches to
literature by emphasising literature’s potential to oppress the
reader (the way it allegedly colonises the reader’s mind and
values, for example), and its complicity with the politics of what
might be considered a Euro-American hegemony. Foucauldian
approaches stress literature’s tendency to re-inscribe, on or
within the reader, society’s ‘master scripts’ that allegedly are
designed to seduce citizens into internalising status-quo values
such that they maintain deferential postures toward established
authority, without realising the extent to which they are policing
themselves, thus allowing the state to avoid exercising the
conventional apparatus of authoritarian controls that inspire
resistance. Marxist approaches stress literature’s participation in
economic practices that, properly understood, undermine no-
tions of ‘intrinsic’ literary excellence and value;

The discipline today

– ‘postcolonial’ approaches, which draw heavily on Marx, Foucault,

Barthes and Said, specifically focus on both the literature
composed by writers of the colonising and postcolonial classes
(or races or ethnic groups) and the literature composed by
writers of the colonised classes, etc., primarily with the aim of
analysing how these literatures reflect and, depending on the
time at which they were written, also helped shape, reinforce or
challenge the colonial process;

– ‘cultural studies’ approaches, which tend not to rest on a particular

theory so much as constitute a general set of strategies of literary
interpretation and pedagogy that favour ‘contextualising’ liter-
ary study within historical practices, political configurations and
social situations rather than engage with questions of literary
quality or value. Such strategies often involve an interest in
studying non-canonical, ‘popular’ literature or fictions, includ-
ing romance novels, science fiction, soap operas, films, comics
. . . and may also include performance studies and other
approaches designed to underscore the arbitrary, historical
nature of the ‘old’ canon and to suggest that study of a much
wider range of kinds of literary representation is both education-
ally progressive and politically liberating. Like postcolonial
studies, cultural studies engage with non-Euro-American ethnic
and multicultural literatures.

Compared to the situation even twenty years ago, this represents an
explosion of possibilities.

The question is, what sort of impact has it

had? What does the contemporary curriculum look like? These are
questions we return to in Chapter 4. But undoubtedly social, economic
and political conditions beyond literature departments have a shaping
and constraining influence on the curriculum and courses, as on
almost every aspect of contemporary university life.

External conditions

We have touched on some of these conditions already, which,
although the details vary, are prevalent in many countries: a dwind-
ling of resources for teaching (for academic staff, library stocks,
accommodation, etc.); increasing numbers of students enrolled as a
result of ‘widening participation’ initiatives, many of them relatively
unprepared for university-level study, and greater numbers of mature

Teaching & Learning English Literature

Hostility to national policy developments among UK academics in English departments
is clearly demonstrated in this survey conducted on behalf of the national English
Subject Centre (www.english.heacademy.ac.uk) to which 53 (or 40 per cent of)
departments responded. In reply to the question Please describe what changes in the
HE environment nationally . . . are having the most impact on your department, those
most often cited in a range of categories were (in descending order):

( excessive bureaucracy/managerialism/central control/audit culture/new initiatives;

( lack of funding/under-funding of increasing student numbers;

( poor funding for research/RAE causing staff to work excessive hours/poor stafﬁng

levels;

( need to incorporate skills-based activities/vocational emphasis;

( student debt/all students effectively part-time.

In commenting on these responses, the report’s authors also note ‘concerns . . . about
the ways in which the humanities were suffering by the predominance of a science
model in much policy at national level’ and ‘about the deleterious effects of
management-speak, an increasingly detached management tier, and ‘‘buzz words’’
producing reﬂex actions’. They conclude: ‘Responses . . . indicated an overwhelming
lack of faith in national policy initiatives’.

(Halcrow Group et al., 2003: 81–2, emphasis added)

IGURE

1.1

UK Higher Education Academy English Subject Centre survey,
2002.

and part-time students; an emphasis on students’ employability and
related skills; demands for accountability and quality assurance
increasingly exercised over academic departments by university
authorities and over the academy by government and its agencies. We
sketched a situation of sustained, rapid change on all fronts, much of
it inspired by governments’ educational policies in turn driven by
‘economic necessity’. (For UK academics’ responses see Figure 1.1.)

Funding and accountability

In the UK in recent years, for example, the higher education system
and its staff have experienced mounting stress. Over a short period an
elite system has become a ‘mass’ system, with a current objective of 50
per cent participation among those under 30 years by 2010 (Depart-
ment for Education and Skills, 2003). A periodic national ‘Research
Assessment Exercise’ (RAE) mounted by the Higher Education Fund-
ing Councils determines each department’s research funding for five
to six years ahead, based mainly on its academics’ publications, their

The discipline today

records of attracting external grants and their ‘national and interna-
tional standing’. Academics are therefore required to undertake ever
more research; in the case of the Arts and Humanities, in the absence
of adequate funding for it. From time to time each department’s
teaching has also been externally assessed, and graded, in a Subject
Review (now an institutional audit system) run by the national Quality
Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA). Both exercises are
costly and time-consuming, and have resulted in ‘league tables’ of
universities and their departments published in the national press.
(See Strathern (2000) on the ‘audit culture’, and the now classic
account by Readings (1996), The University in Ruins.)

North America

In the USA, if we substitute state for central government agencies, the
upshot is not very different: ‘. . . we have been witnessing transform-
ations in the economy that have led to the imposition of corporate
models on the university . . . At the same time, we cannot avoid
noticing that classes are getting bigger and the professoriate is
shrinking . . . States . . . are feeling over-drawn by university budgets,
and a broad public is increasingly eager to tell us how to do our jobs’
(Levine, 2001: 16). In Canada the community

during the past decade has suffered slashed budgets and hiring freezes,
increased class sizes and crushing teaching loads . . . There are now 11
per cent fewer faculty in Canadian universities than in 1992. On average
universities have replaced only half of all faculty departing as a result of
retirement, disenchantment or both. Reduced government support for the
universities is the single greatest reason for shrinking faculty numbers:
since 1993, funding has dropped by 20 per cent . . .

(Demers, 2002: 13–14)

Australia and South Africa

In Australia and South Africa, as in the UK, increasingly central
control is exercised over the higher education system. In Australia,
public institutions’ self-monitoring – confirmed by rounds of institu-
tional audits and sealed with differential funding for teaching –
has been superseded by the requirements of the Australian Universi-
ties Quality Agency, under the aegis of the Department of Education,
Science and Training (DEST). These requirements are that universities
submit an Institutional Quality Assurance and Improvement Plan

Teaching & Learning English Literature

annually, along with implementation strategies and the performance
indicators used to judge their success. The Plan must include the
results of two national surveys: the Course Experience Questionnaire,
which assesses graduates’ perceptions of the teaching they received,
and the Graduate Destination Survey that assesses the employment
success of recent graduates. The Plans are described as ‘the means of
public accountability in the area of quality assurance for Australia’s
publicly funded universities’ (www.dest.gov.au/highered/quality.htm,
accessed September 2004).

As regards the Arts and Humanities in particular, discipline-based

departments have tended to give way to cross-disciplinary schools.
Although student numbers have grown since 1990, staffing has been
cut; there is a widening staff/student ratio and expected hours of work
by academics has risen; semesters have been reduced in length to
reduce the cost of teaching alongside widespread introduction of
electronic teaching-learning methods (Pascoe, 2003: 13–14). Recently,
the Australian Academy of the Humanities (www.humanities.au) –
and especially its new offshoot, the advocacy body CHASS (Council
for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences: www.chass.org.au ) – has
mounted an active campaign to have the funding formula for the Arts
and Humanities revised in favour of these disciplines and to ensure
their involvement in major government initiatives aimed at wealth
creation.

In post-apartheid South Africa

the focus of the democratic government . . . has shifted from the need to
achieve equity in relation to access to higher education [by the black
majority] to the need to achieve greater efficiency in terms of the way
the tertiary system functions as a whole. One result of this shift is that
debates about what it means to provide ‘epistemological access’ in terms
of curricula and teaching methodologies have been sidelined in favour of
the need to develop curricula which will allow students to become
members of the global workforce.

(Boughey, 2003: 65)

One of the first pieces of legislation was the National Qualifications
Framework (administered by the South African Qualifications Auth-
ority), introduced in 1995 to ‘standardize and assure the quality
of qualifications across [the] system’, linked to the introduction
of Outcomes Based Education and a focus on skills (including

The discipline today

entrepreneurship) at all levels (SAQA, 2000: 68). A preponderance of
vocationally-oriented courses was also designed to shift student
enrolment away from the Humanities and Social Sciences, which
have been most popular with students, towards the Sciences and
Technology.

Benchmarking

In many countries, then, control is increasingly exercised over the
university sector, with a concomitant loss of its independence. In the
UK, this now extends to course provision. A Subject Benchmarking
exercise carried out by the QAA is designed to ensure that threshold
standards of provision and of student performance are met by each
university and by individual disciplines across the range of institu-
tions. Thus the agency claims to provide ‘external assurance of quality
and standards’ (www.qaa.ac.uk). Some, however, see such quality
assurance as assuring anything but quality and instead seeking to
control the curriculum and pedagogy; these critics believe the current
trends merely move the universities further down the ‘managerialist’
road that ultimately ends in a higher education system for all practical
purposes controlled by external agencies. In this connection, philos-
ophers of education Nigel Blake and his colleagues remark:

It strikes us as too ironic for words that we should find ourselves invited
by functionaries . . . and politicians to stop thinking imaginatively and
innovatively about education – to stop thinking about the very
institution whose job it is to sustain and reproduce a thinking society.

(Blake et al., 1998: 19)

Standardisation

Such moves to assure comparable standards nationally almost inevi-
tably produce the kinds of standardising effect we remarked on earlier.
Common measures of quality are required across the higher education
curriculum, for example, even though like is not being compared to
like and the standards adopted are almost everywhere derived from
the temporal/social end of the disciplinary spectrum rather than the
cognitive – from a discourse of practical competence characteristic
mainly of applied scientific, technological and vocational subjects –
and with an eye to students’ employability. Hence the South African
policy of Outcomes-Based Education for all. And hence the UK
requirement to plan teaching in terms of the students’ ‘competence’ to

Teaching & Learning English Literature

perform a range of ‘learning outcomes’ and their acquisition of certain
key and ‘transferable’ skills, including information technology. We
shall see shortly how inappropriate this discourse is for a discipline
such as Literature, situated towards the cognitive end of the spectrum.

Centralised funding

First, though, we should observe that at the same time as budgets for
teaching paid directly to the universities by governments in many
countries are cut, greater resource is being allocated to centrally-
inspired and governed teaching bodies – that is, spending which
governments rather than the universities control. In Australia, for
example, the national Carrick Institute for Learning and Teaching in
Higher Education was launched in August 2004 (www.autc.gov.au/
institute.htm), administering a national Teaching Development Grants
scheme and ‘Australian Awards for University Teaching’. There are
plans to underline its authority by conferment of the title ‘The
Australian Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education’,
or some such.

Likewise, in the UK a number of programmes were in 2004

subsumed under the Higher Education Academy (at www.
heacademy.ac.uk), which also administers an awards programme for
teachers. Large sums are now being invested in 74 Centres of Excellence
in Teaching and Learning (CETLs) selected by a centrally-managed
competition – £200–500,000 per annum for five years for each Centre’s
projects and a one-off capital sum in the millions – very few of them,
incidentally, servicing the Humanities and none English Literature. In
both countries the rhetoric is one of ‘modernisation’ and ‘innovation’,
though again critics see this kind of centralising development as a
further encroachment on the universities’ and on academics’ autonomy.

Matters are organised differently in the USA, where the Carnegie

Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, a ‘national center for
research

and

policy

studies

about

teaching

and

learning’

(www.carnegiefoundation.org), is independent and has a much longer
history. The Foundation hosts a large number of programmes and
offshoots, for instance the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of
Teaching and Learning (CASTL), which is a major player in the
rapidly developing and influential ‘Scholarship of Teaching and
Learning’ movement (see Chapter 7). It also hosts a Knowledge Media
Laboratory and it, too, runs a ‘US Professors of the Year’ awards

The discipline today

programme. While it may seem churlish to question any celebration of
teaching, one wonders whether, ironically, awards such as these might
not in fact achieve the opposite of the desired effect (i.e. parity of
esteem between teaching and discipline-based research), by corralling
teaching and so further divorcing it from research?

Classroom control

Sweeping change extends not only to university accountability and
funding but also to such previously entirely internal and autonomous
matters as curriculum decision-making and on deep into classroom
practice itself – in the UK, mainly via the Subject Benchmarking
programme referred to earlier. And we are all e-universities now,
constantly exhorted to apply the rapidly developing electronic tech-
nologies in our teaching in the belief that these technologies are both
modernising and cost cutting, and lest our university should become
eclipsed in the globalising educational marketplace. Teachers become
students again as we learn to use the technologies and, even as
established academics, must undergo (re)training in the business of
teaching itself. In short, almost everywhere higher education is being
transformed into something like an industry that makes ‘courseware’
and offers services around the world for which its ‘clients’ must pay
– and a rather impoverished industry at that, with more and more of
its workers doing predetermined externally controlled jobs on a
contractual basis for relatively little remuneration.

But, if all these changes impose what sometimes seems to us a great

burden, what of our students? How might fee-paying, mounting debt
and the related need for part-time work affect their studies and their
well-being? How should we respond to the extra demands on their
energies, even during term-time? What, these days, do they ‘need’
from us as teachers? Such questions will crop up again, but seeking an
answer to the last of them – what students might need from us – raises
a prior, more fundamental question we will address now: what does
it mean to study and ‘learn’ Literature?

The student agenda

Obviously, at bottom studying Literature means studying literary
works – a curriculum involving some mix of courses/modules and
texts of the kinds outlined earlier, often involving elements of the
student’s personal choice. Leaving aside the contested question of

Teaching & Learning English Literature

which texts in particular, all literary works are of course representa-
tions: of the activities, ideas, beliefs, imaginings and cultural practices
of individuals and groups, in our own and other societies, over time.
As such, the literary text is always something that ‘stands for’ or
represents the conditions of time and place in which it was created, and
all the knowledge, ideas, beliefs and intentions that went into its
making – for we cannot, of course, gain access to these things in a direct
way. The text’s meanings and significance stand in need of analysis,
interpretation and evaluation. This entails the making of meaning.
Meaning does not reside ‘in’ the text, as it were ready to jump out at us,
but is made in the active process of encounter between object and
inquirer (Gadamer, 1989), text and reader. The reader questions the
text and the text ‘questions’ the reader. Processes of analysis-interpre-
tation-evaluation are central to the study of Literature, then; they are
the means through which we produce knowledge in our discipline.

Text and process

It follows from this that students must learn how to read texts closely.
They must engage actively in the quasi-technical process of textual
analysis, involving knowledge of the ‘rules’ governing the composition
of different text genres and sub-genres, their conventional subject
matters, purposes and formal elements, applying to them the relevant
analytical concepts. They must also learn how to make appropriate
interpretation of the text’s meanings, arising out of that formal,
analytical study and including knowledge and understanding of the
socio-historical circumstances of the text’s inception and reception,
along with the interplay of these contexts. Also implied here is
consideration of the text’s (possibly changing) status over time, or acts
of appraisal involving the exercise of evaluative judgement. These
processes are of course contentious, subject to theories about why and
how we do them – theories which themselves change over time and
are part of the contexts that students must come to understand. They
also have to learn how to express persuasively in speech and writing
the ideas they read and think about, within the terms and conventions
of literary discourse (of illustrated argumentation supported by textual
and other evidence).

These central processes of textual analysis-interpretation-evaluation

and of communication are of course dynamic, interlinked and overlap-
ping. It is not as if one analyses a text in detail, then moves on to
interpret its meanings and, finally, appraises the values it represents

The discipline today

and its value to us here and now. Students must come to understand
that these are not sequential stages towards the painstaking construc-
tion of some mental edifice that is subsequently committed to paper
or expressed in speech, but different aspects of a hermeneutic process.
What happens is much more like a ‘circling around’ the text: reading
and questioning, pulling back to consider the text as a whole, jotting
down notes, reading on, re-reading and so on, back and forth, shifting
the focus of one’s attention and revising interim interpretations and
judgements along the way. ‘Questions always bring out the undeter-
mined possibilities of a thing’, says Gadamer (1989: 383), and ‘no one
knows in advance what will ‘‘come out’’ of a conversation’. The
process is open-ended; the reader risks being changed by it.

Discursive knowledge

Along the way, the students are learning what kind of discipline
Literature is, coming to understand that our knowledge is constituted
in its very discursive process. They must understand that it is through
language that we both negotiate and share our meanings with others
and, therefore, that our knowledge is socially constructed within
human language, history and culture, and so open to negotiation and
change. They must understand that there are no fixed hierarchical
structures of knowledge, no obvious causal explanations and no
undisputable truths of any significance anywhere to be found; that
rival discourses struggle for ascendancy within the discipline (witness
in some places a recent redefinition of the discipline as ‘Literatures in
English’), constituting new entities and critical standpoints, such as
‘gender’. (Of course, these observations do not mean that as regards
textual interpretation ‘anything goes’. As we just saw, appropriate
interpretation of meaning is shaped and bounded – by the text’s genre
and form, and by the full range of circumstances of its inception and
its reception including the theoretical-critical considerations brought to
bear on it.) So, incidentally, more shame on us if we wage war over
such change when after all it is in the nature of things. Indeed, without
such creative tension the discipline would not be a living tradition of
thought and practice.

Critical engagement

Our students learn that ‘criticism’ is both the method and the outcome
of their study (Scholes, 1985), that when they attempt to analyse the

Teaching & Learning English Literature

formal elements of a text, interpret its meanings and evaluate its
significance they necessarily take a critical stance in relation to it and,
when they communicate their ideas to others, what they produce (their
own text) is ‘criticism’. Critical engagement is what study of human-
ities disciplines both entails and teaches. Students of Literature do not
learn the skills involved – of analysis, interpretation, evaluation,
synthesis, argumentation, written and verbal communication – as
‘skills’, in a vacuum, but in the course of their literary study and as
mutually influencing and informing abilities that are necessarily
bound up in the very process of that study. Clearly, this kind of
learning involves much more than the acquisition of ‘skills’ (in the
sense usually meant).

In summary, the study of Literature is hermeneutic, intertextual,

participatory, value-laden, context-dependent and relatively indeter-
minate. As its participants learn to make theoretically informed,
appropriate interpretations and judgements, by engaging with the
primary and the secondary texts produced by their predecessors, by
making their own inquiries and producing their own texts, so they
engage in critical processes. As such, this kind of education offers
insights into cultures of the past and of the ways in which, through
our discourse, past and present, we negotiate and share meanings –
insight that may increase and even transform people’s understanding
of themselves, their society and their place in it. Clearly, learning such
as this can have no end-point and few predetermined, objective
‘outcomes’ (in the sense usually meant).

This, then, is the students’ agenda: to learn in these ways and to

learn well. And it is of course the literature teacher’s job to help them
do so. In the next chapter we address the question of appropriate
pedagogy head on, posing the question: What is ‘good’ teaching?

NTRINSIC JUSTIFICATION

In referring just now to the potentially transformational effects of the
study of Literature, we do not mean to suggest that this is the purpose
of a higher education in the discipline. Certainly we have argued in
favour of an approach to teaching Literature, a framing pedagogy, that
foregrounds connections between literature and the human condition,
but this argument was based on empirical truths about our physical
and social existence. By contrast, to say that a higher education in

The discipline today

Literature should be undertaken for the sake of personal transform-
ation would be to offer a normative, extrinsic justification for it that,
like others of its kind ( for wealth creation, social reform . . .) would
serve only to divide the academic community even more. And to that
objection we might add another, one of internal contradiction. For
what about students who would resist the transformational endeav-
our? Might not they see insistence on it as the goal of literary
education as condescending, or impertinent, or even (deep irony)
authoritarian? (‘We have ways of making you transform yourself . . .’)
And wouldn’t there then be a tendency to pathologise those students
who refused to be co-opted? What we are saying is that such
transformation is implicit in the very processes of critical engagement
involved in the study of Literature, and may well ensue.

Critical humanism?

So, might an intrinsic justification of this kind, a sort of marriage
between hermeneutics and pedagogics,

be more appealing to the

community – enabling some kind of federation among us, a ‘speaking
with one voice’? Perhaps coupled with a fuller appreciation of the
autonomy of the Humanities generally, and the difference of this
academic domain from others?

What is essential for this case is that

humanities educators reach agreement about what are the centrally
important processes of their disciplines. Only then will we be in a
position to insist on the value of our hermeneutic and pedagogic
practices – to justify offering our students the wide range of experien-
tial and interactive opportunities many of us have so far managed to,
despite the difficulties involved. And, simultaneously, we might better
resist inappropriate educational conceptions and pedagogic prescrip-
tions from whatever external source. For as regards Literature, we
have seen that when these injunctions inhibit the inherent ‘literariness’
of the educational project, to that extent the discipline is distorted. We
may then go so far as to draw the value of Literature’s inherent
processes to the attention of our students. For it appears that they are
after all marketable; many employers actually want people who can
think clearly and make appropriate interpretations of meaning, are
flexible, adaptable and can communicate well! But that is not to say
that this is what the study of Literature is for. For the study of
Literature is for the study of Literature.

Teaching & Learning English Literature

Notes

1. Notable among them: Duguid (1984); Bérubé and Nelson (1995); Graff (1995);

Ellis (1997); Jay (1997); Scholes (1998); Delbanco (1999). Looking back, the next
generation of US literary scholars is, according to Insko (2003: 347), able to take a
more sedate view of the ‘canon debates’, seeing them as ‘a part of a much longer
continuum’. Likewise, scholars in the UK, where the warring was generally less
vituperative and damaging, who tended to focus on developments in literary
theory and criticism during the period (for example, Widdowson, 1982;
Eagleton, 1983; Guy and Small, 1993; Evans, 1993). In short, the intellectual
history of the discipline, its purposes and curriculum, are highly contested.

2. Jerome Bruner (1996b: 101) argues that there are three ‘primitive’ modes of

narrative – the intersubjective, the actional, the normative – and that they
‘probably all have biological roots in the genome’. As modes of making sense
or meaning (that is, as modes of knowledge), he continues, ‘They certainly have
elaborated support systems in the cultures that humanize us’.

3. ‘English Department Home Pages Worldwide’ includes courses offered in more

than 1,300 departments. See the book’s Bibliography: Websites.

4. Dubbed ‘critical humanism’ (Chambers, 2001; in the same volume also see

Hardwick, and Parker). The small ‘c’ of ‘critical’ is deliberate. In using the term
‘critical humanism’ there is no intention to refer to or endorse the tenets of
Critical Theory, Habermasian or otherwise.

5. Unexpectedly, some support for this point of view is to be found among social

psychologists, such as Feldman and Kalmar (1996). Elaborating an argument
launched by Bruner (1986) they point to two distinct modes of thought, the
Galilean and the Aristotelian. The Galilean addresses itself to non-intentional
objects, affords causal explanations and understanding of what a thing is like,
whereas the Aristotelian addresses intentional objects, offers teleological expla-
nations and understanding of what a thing means. Each is scientific in that each
has its own coherence, the former by subsumption under a covering law and
the latter from within the abstract patternings (or frame) of genres which
‘trigger’ appropriate interpretations of meaning.

Key references

Chambers, E. A. (ed.) (2001) Contemporary Themes in Humanities Higher Education.

Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Readings, W. (1996) The University in Ruins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press.

SAQA (2000) The National Qualification Framework and Curriculum Development.

Waterkloof: South African Qualifications Authority.

Websites

Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, USA, at

www.carnegiefoundation.org

Department of Education, Science and Training, Australia, at

www.dest.gov.au/highered

UK Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, at www.qaa.ac.uk

The discipline today

What is good teaching?

‘T

EACHING

’

AND

‘

GOOD TEACHING

’

A question prior to ‘What is good teaching?’ is ‘What is teaching?’
What, indeed. As teachers we may find this bald question strangely
difficult to answer. It’s just what we do, in lectures, classes, seminars,
workshops, tutorials, by telephone, in teaching texts, websites, online.
We study literary texts and movements, theoretical and critical works,
performances and so forth, and analyse and discuss them with our
students; we try to help our students become better at expressing their
ideas and feelings verbally, in writing, creatively; we mark and assess
their work . . . But, whatever we might reply, we are unlikely these
days to say, simply, ‘Well, we tell them what we know’. And this is in
large part owing to an extraordinarily popular and pervasive force in
higher education known as the ‘Student Learning’ movement. Indeed,
so successfully has attention been shifted from teachers/teaching to
learners/learning in recent times, at least in Britain and Australia, that
it is almost shocking to see the question ‘What is teaching?’ asked at
all. In so far as the movement has helped us think of teaching as a
means to an end rather than an end in itself the effect has been
salutary, for teaching is, of course, a means to an end – a complex of
activities, strategies, mechanisms, invitations, stimuli and rhetorical
ploys designed to help students learn and to become better learners.

The Student Learning movement

Begun in the 1970s, the Student Learning movement’s origins are
credited to the Swedish Göteborg school of academics and educational
researchers – to work carried out by Ference Marton and his
colleagues. (See, for example, the seminal book by Marton et al. (1984)
The Experience of Learning, in which the work of the movement’s
originators is re-presented along with subsequent development of it by

them and by researchers in the UK; and also Ramsden (1992) on the
implications of the movement’s precepts for the practice of teaching.)
This group’s work was underpinned by the belief that ‘good learning’
should be judged by what students learn – rather than how much they
learn, the main criterion of the then more familiar input-output model
of such research (as outlined in Entwistle and Ramsden, 1983: chapter
3) – in the context of the academic subject under study. And it claims
that the approach a student adopts to study is closely related to the
learning outcomes of it. The researchers came to distinguish between
two significantly different approaches to study among their student-
subjects: a surface-level approach, in which the student focuses on the
text (‘the sign’), relies mainly on memorisation and largely regurgitates
what has been ‘learned’ in assignments and exams; and a deep-level
approach, in which ‘what is signified’ is the focus for interpretation
and greater understanding is the goal of study (Marton and Säljö,
1976a: 7–8). Further, the researchers found that the conceptions that
students have of the study tasks before them and the level at which
they process what they study produce either ‘surface’, atomised
learning and a tendency to fail (or partly fail) courses, or ‘deep’,
meaningful learning and greater academic success.

On this view of things, the teachers’ job is of course mainly to foster

a deep-level approach to study among their students, and to encour-
age the students to reflect on the ways in which they study and learn.
This the teacher can do by devising appropriate study activities and,
especially, assessment tasks, for

Students adopt an approach determined by their expectations of what is
required of them. While many students are apparently capable of using
‘deep’ or ‘surface’ strategies, it may be that the current demands of the
examination system are interpreted by them as requiring mainly the
recall of factual information to the detriment of deeper levels of
understanding.

(Marton and Säljö, 1976b: 125)

Generic versus discipline-based

The tendency to adopt a surface or deep approach to study, then, is
not so much a settled disposition or quality of the student herself or
himself; more, it depends upon the educational context – of the subject
being studied, of teachers’ expectations and teaching methods, and of
the kind of assessment system in operation. (For recent, detailed

What is good teaching?

accounts of the original research and its later development, and for
critique, see, for example, Richardson, 2000; McLean, 2001; Chambers,
2002a; Haggis, 2003.)

Whatever one might conclude about the validity and quality of the

Göteborg researchers’ work, it is clear that they perceived strong links
between three factors – the nature and content of the discipline under
study, teaching and learning – connections that have been weakened
progressively over time as detailed investigation of students’ subject-
based study has given way, in the wider movement, to inventory
studies of large numbers of students’ study approaches and practices
irrespective of their discipline, and as ‘teaching’ has become synony-
mous with ‘facilitating learning’. Indeed, ‘the more the teacher talks
the less the student learns’ has become something of a mantra in the
new profession of staff/faculty development.

And the original researchers’ conclusions are diametrically opposed

to the tendencies in higher education policy noted in Chapter 1,
towards development of students’ ‘generic’ or ‘transferable’ skills.
Rather, they argue,

. . . if we want to improve the way people set about learning, we should
not think in terms of a general kind of training independent of the
content of the academic subject . . . general learning skills (if there are
any) should rather be regarded as intrinsic to the study of subject
content.

Likewise,

. . . general principles of teaching (if there are any) should be viewed as
aspects of the teaching of certain specific contents.

(Dahlgren and Marton, 1978: 26–7)

Amen to that. How we got from such a laudable attempt to dent the
carapace of complacency surrounding what was offered in the name
of higher education in the mid-twentieth century – by turning the
research spotlight onto the recipients of our systems – to the present
situation in which ‘teaching’ is almost a dirty word in a ‘student-
centred’ world view is another story. But, to us, the prevalent knee-jerk
reaction that teaching is inherently suspect is badly mistaken and,
indeed, an anti-intellectual view of things.

Teaching & Learning English Literature

Academic-disciplinary core

No doubt there is poor teaching to be found in our universities: an
overemphasis on the formal lecture and on book learning, perhaps,
and insufficient attention to ways of working that help students make
sense of what they read, hear and see. But to denigrate and diminish
the role of the teacher as teacher, or in extreme cases deny it altogether,
is no solution. Still, academic disciplines are the ‘core business’ of the
university – despite being scorned, in some quarters, as producing a
Balkanisation of knowledge. That is because the various disciplines of
knowledge and inquiry we see today have been developed over time
as the (increasingly differentiated) ways we distinguish between, and
mediate, different aspects of human experience, activity and imagin-
ation. Far from constraining us and our understanding of the world,
as teachers or students, the disciplines render our world knowable.
They represent the ways in which people have, so to speak, ‘divided
up’ the world (to some extent artificially no doubt) so that between us
we may attend to different aspects of it in detail and, together, come
to understand it better in all its complexity. However, what is
understood by ‘discipline’ and (interdisciplinary) ‘field’ of knowledge
and inquiry is contested (a classic account is to be found in Hirst, 1974;
also see Blake, 2000, on Habermas and Lyotard, and Peters, 1995).
Discipline boundaries are of course permeable and often overlapping,
and the way the disciplines are constituted is constantly changing as
our circumstances and our understandings change – witness, for
example, the emergence of such fields as Cultural, Environmental and
Media Studies in recent times. The disciplines and fields are thus living
traditions of thought and inquiry.

Academics are those of us in society who make it their business

to get ‘on the inside’ of the disciplines and fields: to understand
how we come to know (the underlying theoretical issues, appropriate
methods of inquiry and the principles and practices involved);
to acquire substantive knowledge of the field, along with the ability
to speak and write expertly in terms of the relevant discourses;
to help extend the limits of our knowledge and understanding.
To suggest that people who know and understand all these things
should not directly teach them to others who have opted to study
them is an astounding proposition. It betrays a woeful underestima-
tion of the complexity of disciplinary structures and the demands
they make on us all, and quite unrealistic optimism regarding

What is good teaching?

most students’ intellectual capacity and stamina for inquiry. Left to
themselves, and to each other, students may ‘pick up’ these things, but
to say that they will do so much more slowly than if they were taught
well is surely not a problematic assertion. So we believe that good
teaching must also be a major focus of educational research and
development in our universities.

‘Learning’ and education

Having said all that, there is a sense in which ‘learning’ does not
depend upon teaching (good or otherwise), as the founders of the
discipline of Philosophy of Education in Britain argued some time ago
(Hirst and Peters, 1970). While of course we are learning things all the
time, in a variety of contexts, the authors first demonstrate that indeed
there is a logical relationship between learning and education –
the particular form of learning we are talking about here. That is, in
education, learning is understood:

to have particular objects (people are setting out to learn something);

to imply certain levels or standards of achievement; and

generally, to be worthwhile/non-trivial: involving the acquisition
of knowledge, understanding and skills that are seen as desirable
and important or useful (even though people may disagree about
what precisely is desirable, etc.).

But, they continue, there is no such necessary relationship between
‘learning’ and ‘teaching’. All students, and perhaps especially those in
higher education, may learn without being taught directly: from
books, films, TV, CD-ROM, the Internet, and from discussion among
themselves (whether face to face or in computer conference).

‘Teaching’

That said, however, the authors go on to argue that when teachers are
teaching, and if they can be said to be teaching at all, they must, at least,
be aiming to create conditions in which learning is possible. Accord-
ingly, they identify three logically necessary conditions for central
cases of ‘teaching’ activities:

1. ‘they must be conducted with the intention of bringing about

learning’;

Teaching & Learning English Literature

2. ‘they must indicate or exhibit what is to be learnt’;
3. ‘they must do this in a way which is intelligible to, and within the

capacities of, the learners’ (Hirst and Peters, 1970: 81).

‘Teaching’, then, takes both a direct object and an indirect object –
educators teach subjects to students.

Signalling ‘content’

Let’s just grant the first condition – assume that as teachers we do
intend to bring about learning, by whatever means. The second
condition draws attention to the point underlined by the Göteborg
researchers: that in education there must be a content to be learned. (It
should be clear that our understanding of content is not of a ‘factual
nuggets’ kind, amenable to multiple-choice testing; nor is it restricted
to propositional knowledge, but includes theories, processes, related
activities and skills, open-ended pursuits, and so on.) Furthermore,
whatever the content it must be made manifest to the students,
otherwise the ‘teacher’ is being self-indulgent or is engaged (even if
unintentionally) in some form of manipulation – and it is indeed hard
to see how students can learn well if they are not aware, to some extent
at least, what it is they are supposed to be learning. But we do not take
this to mean, for instance, that learning objectives or outcomes for
classroom activities should always be fully explained to students at the
start. This would become formulaic and annoying or boring. Rather, it
is often a matter of the teacher contextualising a new topic or aspect of
study – so that the students can see its relationship to other topics, see
the point of it – and often this may be achieved by means of a relevant,
thought-provoking question or activity that focuses their minds on
some of the issues about to be raised (see, for instance, the initial
‘Activity’ in the Words module, in Chapter 5 under ‘The principle of
engagement’). So perhaps ‘signalling what is to be learnt’ is a better,
more inclusive way of expressing this idea.

Intelligibility

As regards the third of the conditions, the extent to which teachers
address the question of intelligibility is an important way of distin-
guishing good teaching from poor because the educational aims that
teachers have rarely determine the precise content to be taught/
learned or the particular teaching methods to be used (as we

What is good teaching?

Aims:

( to bring about learning;

( to signal what is to be learnt;

( to be intelligible to the students and within their capacities;

( to engage and/or extend their enthusiasm for the subject;

( to encourage critical, independent thinking.

IGURE

2.1

Summary: good teaching in higher education.

demonstrate in the next chapter, under ‘Approaches to teaching
academic writing’) – both of which of course profoundly affect the
nature and extent of the students’ understanding. This is actually a
liberating observation. What it means is that there is a variety of ways
in which teachers can make their subject matter intelligible to
students. No doubt some ways of structuring the content of courses
and some teaching methods will be more appropriate than others,
depending on the topic or aspect of study and the students in question,
but nothing (that is educational, in the above definition) is ruled out in
principle.

Educators are justified, then, in thinking widely and creatively

about their teaching methods. Indeed they must, because for cases of
‘good teaching’ in higher education we would want to add two more
conditions. First, that through their teaching educators should be
aiming to engage and/or extend their students’ interest in and
enthusiasm for the subject. We could hardly regard someone as a
good teacher if in the process the students were bored rigid or
otherwise alienated. And second, in order to promote meaningful
learning we would say teaching should be conducted in such a way
that students are encouraged to think critically and independently
about what they study: to ‘think for themselves’.

In these

connections, we would acknowledge the energising value (and, from
the teacher’s point of view, the scholarly value) of teachers forging a
close relationship between their discipline-based research and their
teaching. Enthusiasm for the discipline and the display of serious
critical engagement with it can of course be highly infectious in the
classroom. However, there is more to be said about the relationship
between research and teaching, and that more will mainly be said in
Chapter 7. Meantime, all the conditions of good teaching are
summarised in Figure 2.1.

Teaching & Learning English Literature

Disciplinary process

So, what are the implications of this rather abstract discussion for the
teaching and learning of English Literature? It follows that if the
students’ abilities to undertake the processes fundamental to the
discipline (of literary-textual analysis, of interpretation and evaluation,
and of communication) are relatively undeveloped – and why,
otherwise, would they occupy the role of ‘student’? – good teaching
demands two things:

that students should be made aware of the central importance of
these processes for their knowledge and understanding of Litera-
ture; and

that these processes should be taught, explicitly, comprehensively
and in ways that are intelligible, engaging and thought-provoking
(as we try to demonstrate here and in the next chapter with
respect to teaching close reading, theory and essay writing).

In the past, teachers may have assumed that beginning undergrad-
uates were already (from their schooling) quite accomplished at
reading literary texts, and have taken the view that, if not, they would
soon pick it up. However, that pragmatic ‘solution’ no longer applies
(if it ever did). Given the conditions in the modern academy noted in
Chapter 1 – particularly the demographic changes in the student body
and shifts in the structure and emphases of the curriculum – along
with broader cultural changes that (we shall see in a moment) have
tended to marginalise reading, such an assumption is increasingly
likely to be false. We cannot assume that our students just know how
to read a literary text, or understand what might be meant by genre
(either in the literary sense or as regards academic ways of writing),
or are able to structure an argument and provide appropriate and
sufficient evidence in support of it. What is not so clear is how such
teaching is to be accomplished, when our students are so heterogen-
eous, the curriculum is expanding and also increasingly fragmented
by modularisation, and class contact time and resource for teaching
are curtailed. But, at least, we can acknowledge that some shift of
attention and resource from the later to the early stages of undergrad-
uate education is strongly implied – something that will be familiar to
teachers of adult students for whom the conventional higher education

What is good teaching?

entry qualifications are often waived. We will look more closely at
issues of curriculum and teaching method in Chapters 4 and 5 of the
book.

For now, the focus is on the nature of this kind of teaching and,

specifically, on teaching three of the processes previously identified as
fundamental to our students’ interests as students of Literature. That
is, on students’ learning:

1. how to read literary texts closely (understanding processes of

textual analysis and interpretation);

2. how to evaluate what they read (in the modern academy, associated

with understanding the role of literary theory and the practice of
criticism);

3. how to communicate their knowledge, understandings, ideas and

judgements in writing.

The first of these processes is discussed in what follows and the
remaining two in the next chapter.

Our emphases in this first part of the book – on close reading,

evaluation and writing – are further justified by evidence from a recent
survey of practice in UK Literature departments conducted on behalf
of the Higher Education Academy English Subject Centre (Halcrow
Group et al., 2003). The survey found that:

departments regard attention to students’ ‘Reading/interpretative
skills’ as the second-most important guiding consideration in
designing Literature degree courses (p. 55);

‘critical/literary theory’ is the most widely taught compulsory
course at Level 1 (p. 70);

departments regard ‘Close reading’ and ‘Theoretical approaches
to literature’ (respectively) as second and fourth in importance
among their graduates – yet these same categories top the list of
aspects of the students’ knowledge that the departments are least
satisfied with on graduation (p. 74);

‘presentation of academic work’ (referencing, bibliography, etc.)
and ‘essay-writing skills’ are most often made compulsory ele-
ments of the Literature programme (p. 44);

the essay ‘written in non-exam conditions’ is the most frequently
employed method of student assessment (p. 38).

Teaching & Learning English Literature

So these three aspects of a higher education in Literature are of the first
importance and are also widely recognised as problematic.

Given that our focus here is practical – how to teach these things –

we will sometimes demonstrate as well as talk about them. Here at the
start of the book we are addressing ourselves especially to beginning
and fairly new teachers, on the assumption that they may have
relatively little experience of teaching.

N APPROACH TO TEACHING CLOSE READING

TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

AND INTERPRETATION

One of the most deadly defects of the teacherly optic nerve is the
blindness that hides from us the fact that few of our students, even
literature majors or specialists, are readers of literature to the same
great extent that we, their teachers, are, and the problem with this
blindness is that it can lead us to think that students are being lazy,
difficult or unintelligent when they are really being only inexperi-
enced. More and more of us live in an image world, an icon world, a
movie and TV world, an Internet world, and even when we do still
live in a word-and-print world we are more likely to see or hear words
and print in soundbite form than in literary form.

Even students who

are only ten years younger than their youngest teachers will have been
raised in an Internet world that was not available to those teachers
when they were that age. What does this mean for us as teachers? In
truth, nobody knows what the full implications of our societies’ move
from a word-and-print to an image-and-icon world means – dis-
cussion of the topic is moving full bore – but there are some obvious
implications for teachers of Literature.

At the least, it means that most literature students will not be

voracious readers (see Figure 2.2). They may not even be what most
teachers would call avid readers. Saying this is not intended to
deprecate students’ abilities or their motives for taking literature
courses. It is an attempt to be realistic about the place of serious
reading in today’s society. A recent report from the USA (Reading at
Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America) summarises the situation
‘in a single sentence: literary reading in America is not only declining
rapidly among all groups, but the rate of decline has accelerated,
especially among the young’ (National Endowment for the Arts, 2004:
Preface, vii). Just as writers of essays or novels must know who their

What is good teaching?

In response to the question . . . have you observed any changes in the proﬁle of your
students over the last ﬁve years which have affected their teaching and learning?, the
following features were most often reported:

( constricted range of reading/knowledge;

( decline in writing skills;

( engaged in paid employment/other commitments.

The report’s authors remark: ‘Comments on student writing skills tend to concentrate
on basic literacy shortcomings, and on weakness in expression and organisation. The
burden of opinion is that these weaknesses are on the increase . . .’ A marked drop in
the range of students’ reading is consistently noted ‘under the heading of a decline in
preparedness. There is a signiﬁcant indication of concern about the extent of students’
reading or knowledge. . . . Less experience of complex literary texts [especially
pre-twentieth-century texts], and difﬁculties with ‘‘academic discourse’’ were also
noted’.

(Halcrow Group et al., 2003: 14)

IGURE

2.2

Changes in student proﬁle: UK English Subject Centre survey,
2002.

audience is, so teachers must have a feel for where their students are,
what world(s) they live in, and this means that all of us, experienced
and inexperienced teachers alike, need to take our students’ compara-
tively lesser degree of saturation in prints and words into account
when we teach literature. ‘Taking into account’ does not mean that we
have to make excuses for students when they perform poorly, but it
does mean that if we have no idea where their starting point is or what
their context is, then we can wind up making both them and ourselves
miserable by holding inappropriate expectations. Worse, we can
misdiagnose, and thus never fix, the nature of both our problems and
theirs.

‘Automatic’ perception

Attending closely to complex, multilayered and densely evocative
details arranged in formal patterns – as in stories, novels and poems
– is not a natural act. What is natural is saving the energy that
perception requires by learning routines, shortcuts and automatic
screening strategies. All of us are incredibly skilled at making large
inductive leaps of perception based on minimal data: this is of course
how caricature works. If, for example, we could not screen out most
of the visual and auditory stimuli in a room where we are listening to

Teaching & Learning English Literature

a lecture or a concert we would go crazy trying to deal with all the
(irrelevant) data: dots in the acoustical tiles on the ceiling, the pattern
in the carpet and curtains, the smudges and flecks on the painted
walls, the quality of light coming in the windows, the squeaking of
other people’s chairs, the sounds of their breathing . . . In order to get
through the day, any day, we must learn how not to attend to details
that we can sacrifice. Indeed, as contemporary life grows more and
more complex people learn to take more and more shortcuts. This
general pattern of perception – relying automatically on cues that we
know so well we don’t have to think about either the cues or the
response – is a way of life for all of us, a habit of mind. However, the
negative side of this habit is that we don’t cultivate it selectively. We
automatically tend to see the world as caricature, to cease to see the
details of life that would, if we were paying better attention, enrich and
vivify us. So teachers can hardly be surprised when students distracted
by lack of experience, by families, by employment or by all of these at
once do not have good skills for paying close attention to complex,
nuanced, connotative, suggestive, formalised literary details worked
out according to literary conventions that few of them have very much
real experience or knowledge of in today’s image-and-icon world.

Habitualisation

As a teacher and a professional reader you will have worked hard to
develop your own skills of analysing and responding to literary cues
at a very high level of intellectual acuity, and now you possibly
remember little of the difficulty involved in that process. Between your
student days and now, you have learned to overcome, at least with
respect to literary experience, the tendency toward automatic percep-
tion – what the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky calls ‘habitualiz-
ation’ and which he took to be the enemy of art as well as life – and
now you have discovered the joy of paying close attention. You know
what it can teach you, how it develops your cognitive powers and how
it can carry you to new places in your intellect, feelings and
judgements. But only a few of your students know this, and those few
know it only intuitively or experientially, not theoretically. Few of
them will have actually thought about it, and hardly any of them will
have reflected on how to cultivate this ability. To help our students
learn the thrill of paying close attention, to think about its advantages
and to cultivate it as an ongoing skill is one of the great opportunities

What is good teaching?

available to us as teachers of literature. However, the students’
inability to read texts closely, their inability merely to attend to all the
words in some sensitive and thoughtful fashion, stands in their way
and in ours. What can be done about it?

A case-book class on James Joyce’s ‘Araby’

In what follows we present something like a case-book example of
close reading based on Joyce’s short story (from Dubliners). We have
taught this story many times and can report that, no matter how
simple it may appear to you, our students almost always find it
confusing. Now you know that if they read it closely, take it apart into
small pieces and reconstruct it into its large patterns, it will become
clearer to them. But knowing how to help them do this, while it is of
the essence in teaching literature, is no easy thing. No one can learn a
complicated set of skills by listening to an expert talk about doing it.
And it will do no good simply to display the doing of it yourself.
When we do this our students are in the state we are all in when we
watch a highly skilled and fast computer whiz, for example, who
thinks to be showing us how to do this or that but is in fact doing it
for us, and going so fast in the meantime that we have no idea how
the outcome was achieved. So the question is, how do we get our
students actively involved in analysing the details of ‘Araby’ in class
such that they acquire a sense of their own of how it works?

The class is not a real class, of course, and the vignette that follows

is not a transcript. But if not real it is certainly realistic in the sense
that it is a compilation of many classes we have taught over the years.
The questions and answers are designed to illustrate problems
encountered by both students and the novice teacher, and to suggest
what teachers can do to make those encounters, some of them
problems, productive and useful. Our remarks (i.e. those of the
‘Authors’) are interspersed. The story is included as Appendix 1 on the
book’s website (www.sagepub.co.uk/chambers.pdf), with the para-
graphs numbered for ease of reference. The students were asked to
read the story, at least twice, before coming to class.

The kind of class we are imagining here is a seminar group, a class

of students ranging somewhere in size from 15 to 25, in which the
teacher takes the lead and teaches: that is, it is not the kind of seminar
in which a student presents a paper and leads discussion of the topic.
However, the teacher is not lecturing – she or he expects the students

Teaching & Learning English Literature

to talk, not just listen. It is the kind of class in which you want students
to lay their views, analyses and interpretations out on the table for
public discussion. The teacher’s immediate job is to ask the questions
and devise the strategies that will get students to open up and become
involved, and the long-range task is to help students become better at
detailed reading. To paraphrase a famous movie title from the 1980s,
the teacher is trying to teach ‘close encounters of the literary kind’,
and, at the same time, a kind of ‘discourse domain’ focusing on literary
interpretation. We will assume that the students in the class have been
made aware of these as learning goals prior to the start of the session:
that the teacher indeed intends to bring about learning and has
signalled to the students what they should be trying to do (or what is
to be learnt).

Teacher: So . . . what do you think of this story?

Students: No response. No eye contact. Much scrutiny of walls and shoe laces.

(A spirit of stolid resistance ﬁlls the room. The teacher silently thinks, ‘the
students, conscious of fear within themselves, gaze at the walls with dark
imperturbable faces’. Time stretches away like an empty ﬁeld. Teacher begins to
tense, palms to sweat.)

Authors (magisterial voices from the ether speaking in unison): The problem
here is real but not insurmountable. It is not true that your students have just
gazed on Medusa’s face. The problem, in fact, is not your students at all. The
problem is that question you started with, ‘What do you think of this story?’
It’s what you want to know of course, and it’s what some of your students,
believe it or not, are actually eager to tell you, but the question is so
amorphous, so big and so loose, that it’s intimidating. It sounds as if the
student who dares to answer it is committing herself to say the last word
about the story, not the ﬁrst word, and, so, he or she – all of them – would
just as soon, in a sudden attack of generosity, allow some other brave soul the
honour of dying on his or her sword, thank you. Start over, trying a different
question that is more focused and permits an answer that doesn’t force the
student to speak from his or her sensibility, which is what most of them feel
insecure about anyway. Ask a question that allows the student to back up
what he or she says with a reference to the text. This will provide the students
some solid footing, and allow them to feel that risking an answer is not the
same thing as risking a reputation. And in any case it’s what you want to
encourage.

Teacher: Well, of course there are many entryways into this story. Can you
suggest why there might be so many references to blindness, darkness,
shadows, obscured vision and the like? How do these references seem to work?
What do they make you think of? Where do they lead you?

What is good teaching?

Students: More impassive silence. More scrutiny of walls and shoes. More
tangible but invisible resistance.

(Teacher begins to feel really sick at heart, begins to think of being on the golf
course, or in the library, or on the rack: anywhere but here in this classroom.)

Teacher to Authors: So much for magisterial voices from the ether. OK, I did
what you suggested. You two have any more bright ideas? I suppose you’re
going to say this is my fault.

Authors: No, this is not all your fault, and ﬁnding fault is not a very helpful
strategy for ﬁxing things in any case. Start down that route and soon you’ll be
translating all teaching problems into issues of moral character: ‘Am I a good
enough person to be an effective teacher?’, or ‘Why don’t my students have a
greater sense of responsibility for their own learning?’ You don’t need to
reform your character; you’ve just got to get better at asking questions. The
problem this time is not that the question was unfocused and vague but that,
probably (one never knows for sure, but experience says . . .), you piled too
many good questions on top of each other. The logic that if one good
question is good then four good questions are four times as good doesn’t
hold. The students are not sure which question you want answered and, since
most of them can’t remember all four questions at once anyway, you get,
once again, silence. So try again – no need to get bitter over one class that
doesn’t start right. On some days you’ll ask the perfect questions, like a
musician with absolute pitch, and things still won’t go right, so don’t think any
one class or course is the ultimate test of your ability. Now, pick your favourite
of the questions you asked and start over.

Teacher to Authors (assertively): No, I want to ask another question instead.

Authors (rolling their eyes): OK, ﬁne. Ask another question. You certainly
don’t need our permission.

Teacher: Got rather carried away with questions there, didn’t I? Let’s go on to
another one. Tell me, anyone, who is saying the words of the ﬁnal sentence in
paragraph 5, and how do you know who’s saying them: ‘But my body was like a
harp and her words and gestures were like ﬁngers running upon the wires’?

Tricia (tentatively): Well, I was confused about that. It seems like the reader is
seeing everything through the young boy’s eyes, but this doesn’t sound to me
like something a kid would say. It’s too poetic and high-ﬂown, isn’t it? So I
wasn’t sure who was doing the speaking here. Is it really the boy or someone
else?

Teacher (with almost too much enthusiasm): Great. Very good comment, Tricia.
There is something odd about the narrative technique here, isn’t there? Can
someone point to a passage where it seems clear that the young boy is doing the
speaking?

Authors: Good stuff. Tricia didn’t mention narrative technique as such, and
although she didn’t quite say there was something odd about it she did imply

Teaching & Learning English Literature

it, but you’ve managed to throw a usefully tighter noose around her insight
and slip a technical term into the discussion so that it seems natural to use it
and not just something to be memorised.

Paul: Yes, in paragraph 4 everything that is said could be the young boy
narrating his own experience, at least until ‘and yet her name was like a
summons to all my foolish blood’, and suddenly this doesn’t sound like a young
kid any longer. Kids don’t talk about their ‘foolish blood’. The narration seems to
skip back and forth from one point of view to another.

Students: Nods of agreement around the room.

Teacher (starting to relax now, feeling the ﬂow; resisting the temptation to ask
what ‘foolish blood’ actually means; sensing that that juicy question – regardless
of how nice it would be to bite into – will take everyone off the track of learning
something about narrative technique, ‘and we’re getting so close to the big
point about narration in this story; gotta see it through’.) Yes indeed. So whose
point of view could this be? The only other characters in the story who even
know the young boy are his aunt and uncle, but they’re clearly not the narrators,
so where does this other point of view come from? Is Joyce sticking these poetic
bits in gratuitously, or are they connected somehow, and to whom?

Authors (whispering in the teacher’s ear): You’re doing great; they’re doing
great, but resist the temptation to run on. Don’t put together a laundry list of
questions. Keep the discussion on track.

Beth: Well, I hadn’t realised this until you asked that question, but now that I
think about who the other speaker couldn’t be, it’s got to be the young boy,
after all, doesn’t it? Only he’s different in some passages.

Sam (sees something; doesn’t wait for the teacher): Yeah, he’s different. He’s
older. It seems as if the narration is slipping back and forth between the young
boy’s point of view and himself as an older man, looking back.

Teacher (immensely pleased): Absolutely right! All of you, building on each
other’s answers, have put this puzzle together. The odd thing about the
narrative technique in this story – and as you study more stories you will see that
it’s not really so odd – is that you’ve got two points of view coming from the
same person at different ages in his life: ﬁrst, the young boy actually going
through the represented experiences and, second, the older man looking back,
remembering his youthful experiences and commenting on his boyhood self as
he remembers. Does this make sense? Can anyone ﬁnd another passage where
you see this happening?

Andrea: Sure. Look at paragraph 12. It begins with a point of view only the
older man could have – ‘What innumerable follies laid waste my waking and
sleeping thoughts’ blah blah – but then suddenly the little kid is speaking: ‘I
asked for leave to go to the bazaar on Saturday night. My aunt was surprised’
and so on. I see it now. The two points of view get interwoven throughout the
story.

What is good teaching?

Teacher: Exactly. And how does knowing this affect your view of the ending of
the story? Does it change your view of the ending?

Esther: Yes, it does. When I ﬁrst read the story I thought the ending was way
overdone. Very melodramatic, an over-the-top kind of thing. But if that ﬁnal
sentence is the older guy putting an interpretation on the feelings of his younger
self, then maybe it works.

Teacher: Yes, Esther, and how does it work? Do over-the-top feelings go with
being older or with being younger?

Esther: Oh, with being younger I think. I mean, I guess there are a lot of
emotional adults, but adolescent kids are brilliant at being overly emotional.

Teacher: Very keen. So someone tell me what he’s got to be so emotional
about.

Authors: You’re getting really good at this: single questions, tight focus,
good tracking. Next you’ll be wanting a teaching award.

Teacher to Authors: Don’t interrupt. I’m busy. No, I don’t want a teaching
award. I want this class to work round to seeing that the boy’s temperament
and attitudes are out of place in the dreary world of clichés and empty pieties
and dull routines of Dublin life, and what that might mean. But I’m not sure
how to get there. Time is passing and we haven’t even begun to talk about
the story’s metaphors yet, or the overall plot.

Authors: Laudably ambitious. Look, there’s no rule about this but you never
get everything done that you want to get done. As long as what you are
getting done leads to actual skills and knowledge – even if it’s not all the
actual skills and knowledge you’d like – that’s all right. You’re doing
something real here. You’re actually teaching; the students are actually
learning. This is what it’s all about (and you can’t expect it to go this well all
the time). Even if you did get everything done that you’ve got in your mind,
you’d suddenly discover there was a lot more you left out. Teaching is like
politics: the art of the possible. Go for what you can do in the time you’ve got
and let the rest take care of itself. If you help make real learners out of these
students they’ll be putting things together in new ways for the rest of their
lives, and they may discover on their own the parts you didn’t have time to
explore with them.

Kevin: Well, I guess he could be an emotional kind of kid for psychological
reasons. I mean, it appears that he’s an orphan, and that his aunt and uncle
don’t know anything about raising kids, that he doesn’t have anyone as a role
model for growing up, and that he’s just failed at doing something he promised
for the girl he wants to impress. I guess I might be emotional.

Teacher: Right, Kevin, but can you see any evidence in the story that this
particular young lad has a different kind of emotional life from the people
around him even without the problems you’ve just pointed to? What do you
make of such statements as, ‘I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a

Teaching & Learning English Literature

throng of foes’, and ‘The syllables of the word Araby . . . cast an Eastern
enchantment over me’?

Students: Kevin subsides. Other students stare blankly.

(There’s a shift of mood in the room, a sudden evasiveness, and then . . . silence.
The just now lively discussion slides smoothly under water like a submarine and
disappears.)

Teacher (to self, then to the Authors): Whoa! What happened there? What’d
I say? Hey, you two, where are you when I need you?

Authors: What can we say? You used the ‘good/but’ construction.

Teacher: What in the world are you talking about? What’s the ‘good/but’
construction? I thought you said there were no hard rules.

Authors: There aren’t, but . . . – well, what do you take someone to mean
when he or she uses the ‘good/but’ construction with you?

Teacher (thinks a moment): I take it to mean ‘good but not-so-good’, like
pretending that a rictus is a smile.

Authors: Agreed. Kevin actually put forward an array of textual evidence in
support of his claim about the young boy’s emotionalism. You and we know
there’s more to it, and that it would be good to get this out on the table, but
not at the expense of shutting down a productive discussion. You just got too
far ahead of your class there. Survive and learn. This is not a class in how much
more you know than the students. It’s not their job to guess what’s in your
mind – what the ‘right’ answer is. It’s a class in teaching textual analysis and
interpretation, and you reacted to an inexperienced student who did a pretty
impressive job of it with a ‘good but not-so-good’ response that suddenly shut
down the whole class. Do you want a suggestion?

Teacher: No! . . . Yes, I suppose.

Authors: Try changing the pedagogical format. When a patient’s heart
suddenly stops beating, apply the electric paddles. Changing formats in
mid-class can be like that. Experience tells us that you are not likely to
resuscitate this discussion so instead of ﬂoundering for the rest of the hour try
a peer-collaboration format. Break the class up into small groups of four or
ﬁve students, and give them a topic – or perhaps different topics for each
group – to discuss among themselves and then report back their ﬁndings to
the class as a whole.

Teacher: I have an idea for pursuing that question and some others. There are
twenty of us round the table, so let’s divide up in ﬁve groups to discuss them.
The ﬁrst thing for each group to do is quickly decide who will speak for the
group at the end of the session.

What is good teaching?

Group 1, you four round this end of the table, your assignment is to examine

style, that is particular instances of heightened language in the story. Find some
examples – metaphors, images, allusions, sentence rhythms, tone and so on –
and discuss among yourselves what kind of purposes or effects these stylistic
strokes accomplish.

Group 2 over here, your assignment is to examine plot, not as a matter of ‘ﬁrst

this happens then that happens’ but as a matter of overarching structure. If the
story ends with a sense of ﬁnality, of resolution, how did it get there from its
opening sense of instability, of something about to happen?

Group 3, your assignment is to pick up on the last question I asked. Take the

two passages I asked about, see if there are any others like them, and try to
extend Kevin’s ﬁne analysis of some of the reasons for the boy’s highly wrought
emotions at the end of the story.

Group 4, your assignment is to look at the references to social class in this

story and to try and ﬁgure out how they contribute to the story’s overall effect.
There are not a lot of class references, and they’re a bit subtle, but they’re there.

Group 5, your assignment is to think about gender and sexual issues. Is there

any gender signiﬁcance to the fact that neither the boy nor Mangan’s sister is
ever given a name? To what extent does sex enter into the boy’s ‘confused
adoration’, as he calls it, of Mangan’s sister? What stage of life do you think the
young boy is at with regard to sexual development, and what does it have to do
with anything?

I’ll just jot these topics down on the whiteboard while you get yourselves

organised . . .

You may be thinking that not much progress was made in this class on
teaching close reading and interpretation of text. In a way, that’s true.
The class really only began to explore some aspects of the narrative
form. (In this connection, McGann et al. (2001) discuss the somewhat
unexpected problems their students have with reading fiction – issues
that re-emerge in Chapter 5 under ‘Reading’). But what the students
are beginning to understand, in the context of the story ‘Araby’ and
not in the abstract, is some of the ways in which the story ‘works’ and
what is meant by ‘narrative technique’. And, led by a teacher and in
discussion with other students, they are coming to understand these
things for themselves. They will need further sessions of this narrowly
focused kind, exploring other stories and also texts that represent
other literary genres.

All the time they will be building secure

foundations of knowledge and understanding for their later, more
independent and sophisticated studies. Meaningful learning such as
this cannot be rushed and it certainly makes demands on teaching
time. Paradoxically, this class shows both how little beginning
students can be expected to achieve in one session and how much.

Teaching & Learning English Literature

Pedagogic issues

As regards pedagogy, a number of issues were exemplified or raised
in the course of the seminar: how important it is to lead classroom
discussion along fruitful lines by asking tightly focused, text-based
questions that beginning students are able to respond to and thereafter
to keep the discussion ‘on track’; to avoid making a discouraging
‘Good, but . . .’ response to the students’ contributions; to shift the
focus of questioning if the hoped-for response is not made; to limit
one’s ambitions and so avoid despondency (neither blaming oneself
unduly nor the students) if the discussion is not brilliant nor its scope
as broad as planned; if discussion breaks down, to consider shifting
the pedagogic format. All these strategies help ensure that the
discussion is to the point, is intelligible to the students and is
engaging. To this we would add the desirability of encouraging the
students to respond to each other, as Sam did to Beth, so that (even at
this early stage in their studies) the teacher takes a back seat at times
when discussion is going well – that is, of promoting the idea that the
students should be thinking for themselves. Apart from these matters,
there are a few other points we might draw out from the class.

Engagement in discussion

You may have noticed that the teacher praised every student who
spoke – indeed ‘all’ of them for helping solve the ‘puzzle’ – if rather
belatedly in Kevin’s case and sometimes perhaps over-enthusiastically.
(There is undoubtedly a tendency for passages such as these to ‘sound’
rather condescending in print, as writers of distance-teaching material
are well aware.) Obviously, teachers should not patronise their
students – nor indeed show them up publicly in any way – but,
whatever one’s feelings about such praise-giving, the intention is
undoubtedly good: to reassure the student speakers (and nodders) and
to encourage all the students to join in the discussion. But can
everyone join in, anything like equally, given class sizes and the
constraints on class time? And does it really matter if some students
speak only occasionally? Silence does not necessarily indicate disen-
gagement or lack of understanding or even passivity. The quiet
students may be following the discussion carefully and thinking hard
– as nods of the head and changes in facial expression often testify –
and they may perform just as well in their subsequent written work
as their more garrulous (confident?) peers. Leaving these questions

What is good teaching?

open for now, there is no doubt that if our aim is to involve every
student actively then the small-group strategy with which the class
ended is an effective way of doing it. Less confident students are
usually a lot happier to speak in small peer groups; indeed, it is much
harder for anyone to remain silent for whatever reason. And this is
surely far preferable to the teacher picking out one particular student
after another to answer questions – something that the novice teacher
of this class didn’t ever do.

Peer collaboration

The peer-collaboration format is presented sketchily here. But note that
the teacher took a firm lead in identifying the topics for discussion and
in assigning students to their various groups – on the basis of
convenience, of where they happened to be sitting – which was
necessary for getting this hastily introduced stratagem underway
quickly. There are of course other ways of doing it. Also, the
subsequent plenary period is not depicted in which the groups’
spokespersons would make their reports and the teacher sum up.
However, we should note here the importance of the teacher allocating
equal reporting-back periods to the groups and of keeping in reserve
sufficient time to pull the whole discussion together. In summarising,
the teacher fulfils the crucial functions of confirming for the whole
group the learning gains that have been made and continuing the
process (begun in response to the first contribution to the class by
Tricia) of ‘translating’ what the students have said into terms that are
closer to the target literary-analytical discourse. In a sense the teacher
‘models’ this academic discourse – demonstrates it in speech – and at
the same time expresses in her or his conduct of the class the scholarly
values enshrined in it: a desire to get at the ‘truth’, patient attention to
detail, treating other people (as independent centres of consciousness)
and their views with respect, and so on. Many of the issues raised here
are discussed further in Chapter 5 of the book, on methods of teaching.

Finally, you will have noticed that in the discussion no reference

was made to literary theory or criticism: no formal reference to ‘genre’,
‘character’, ‘focalisation’, etc., and no explication of the mimetic
theoretical orientation or other theories in general or particular. This
was deliberate; the next chapter includes discussion of literary theory
and criticism in the context of pedagogy. But of course theoretical-
critical considerations are also bound up in processes of text analysis.

Teaching & Learning English Literature

OSTSCRIPT

In this chapter we discussed what it means ‘to teach’ and, subsequent-
ly, conceptions of ‘good’ teaching. And we tried to demonstrate how
some of those principles might be applied in practice within our
discipline – especially (by means of the ‘Araby’ vignette) setting out to
teach beginning students close reading of text and interpretation of
textual meanings. Many of the issues raised will of course recur
throughout the book. But early on in the book processes of ‘reading’
seem a particularly appropriate emphasis, in view of our previous
discussion of the nature of Literature as a discipline, of the forces
currently acting on higher education and their effects on the contem-
porary student body, and of evidence that this aspect of undergrad-
uate education is problematic drawn from a recent survey of UK
Literature departments.

In short, we have argued that processes of textual analysis-

interpretation-evaluation and communication are fundamental to stu-
dents’ interests as students of Literature. And we argued that as a
consequence of recent demographic and other changes within the
academy, along with significant shifts in the wider culture, teachers
cannot make assumptions about beginning students’ previous know-
ledge and experience of literature. Thus, we concluded, all the
centrally important processes of the discipline must be taught explicit-
ly. Accordingly, in the next chapter we turn to preliminary discussion
of the remaining processes: the complex and highly contested ques-
tions of textual evaluation and the place of literary theory and criticism
in the teaching of Literature, and the teaching of writing.

Notes

1. Here we are referring to ‘critical thinking’ in general: that is, taking a critical

stance to any ‘text’ (including the teacher’s) and forming one’s own judgements
of it – such matters as whether the argument is well reasoned, supported with
convincing evidence/apparently unbiased, sufficiently comprehensive and so
on, and also whether the reader agrees with the authors’ assumptions, beliefs
and claims (see Moore, 2004). Specifically literary-critical processes are dis-
cussed throughout the book.

2. For analyses of the major, and as yet not fully understood, cultural shifts that the

world is now undergoing from being print- to media-based, see such works as:
Wendell Berry (1983) Standing by Words; Sven Birkerts (1994) Gutenburg Elegies
and (1996) Tolstoy’s Dictaphone: Technology and the Muse; Bill McKibben (1992) The
Age of Missing Information; Mark Crispin Miller (1998) Boxed In; and Neil Postman
(1982) The Disappearance of Childhood and (1985) Amusing Ourselves to Death.

What is good teaching?

3. Detailed analysis of a poem, for beginning students, is to be found in Chambers

and Northedge (1997) The Arts Good Study Guide, Chapter 6. The chapter also
explores some applications of literary theory to the poem in a preliminary way.
Highly recommended books on close reading are Scholes (2001) and Lentricchia
and DuBois (2003). And the essays in the section ‘From the Classroom’ in the
journal Pedagogy (Duke University Press) are richly suggestive, offering a
variety of up-to-date examples of classroom practice; similarly the ‘Case
Studies’ in Arts and Humanities in Higher Education (Sage). An especially rich
source of ideas about group discussion processes is Ben Knights’ book From
Reader to Reader (1992).

Key references

Halcrow Group with Gawthrope, J. and Martin, P. (2003) A Report to the LTSN

English Subject Centre: Survey of the English Curriculum and Teaching in UK Higher
Education. Royal Holloway, University of London: LTSN English Subject Centre
(Report Series No. 8).

Marton, F., Hounsell, D. and Entwistle, N. (eds) (1984) The Experience of Learning.

Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press.

Ramsden, P. (1992) Learning to Teach in Higher Education. London: Routledge.

Websites

Website for this book, Teaching and Learning English Literature, at

www.sagepub.co.uk/chambers.pdf

Teaching & Learning English Literature

Teaching literary theory

and teaching writing

‘P

OSITIONING

’

LITERARY THEORY

As the value of theory stock began to rise dramatically about thirty
years ago – in a bull market that still persists – many teachers of
literature back then (and some still today) were highly suspicious of it
in the classroom. Occasionally, the more excitable among them were
given to pounding the table like Dickensian characters, asserting
loudly (thump thump) that they weren’t going to stand for any of this
blasted ‘theory nonsense’ in their literature classes, where they
performed the time-honoured, probably divinely appointed job of
teaching students ‘just to read the words on the page’. We’ve come a
long way since then. No one believes in ‘innocent’ readings any more,
or theory-free readings either. And no one thinks any longer that just
the words on the page are transparent with regard to anything,
whether semantics, gender, politics, ethnicity or any other issue that
might (or might not) be explicitly referred to in any particular work of
literature ‘under interrogation’ – a courtroom or jail house metaphor
that says volumes about contemporary approaches to literary analysis.
Given the long history of literature and the extremely recent ‘moment’
of theory’s ascendancy, it is astonishing that theory could have become
so important in such a short time. A brief look at the history of literary
study in the academy (with apologies for the sketchiness of the look)
should help us position theory appropriately.

Intellectual traditions

Academic study of literature has its roots in four intellectual and
academic traditions – philology, classics, rhetoric, belles-lettres – and
owes many of its analytical techniques to these traditions.

Philology

From philology, literary study inherited highly developed techniques
for concentrating powerfully on all the possible meanings and
significance of individual words. Philology as a discipline provided the
model of a methodology for interpreting individual words at three
important levels: their semantic territory, their etymological history, and
the semantic layers made up by their etymological history. Philology
also taught literary study how to fit the word, with all its unpacked
baggage, back into the context of the passage from which it came.

Classics

Classics provided literary study with two things, as we saw in Chapter 1:
literary works to be studied (a curriculum for Literature) and the model
of a pedagogy for teaching literature. It was a pedagogy of professorial
lecture combined with student recitation, that is each student in turn
translating a given passage. In classics classes the translation was literal
(Greek and Latin words rendered into English words); in later literature
classes taught in the vernacular the translation became ‘interpretation’,
but often of a literal sort based on word-by-word paraphrasing (‘What
Milton is saying in these lines is . . .’) to establish to the teacher’s
satisfaction that the student ‘got’ the meaning of the passage.

Rhetoric

Rhetoric, the ancient discipline of the arts of persuasion, provided
literary study with a large number of concepts, analytical categories
and methodological strategies that were easily transferred from the
analysis of speeches to the analysis of literary works. Rhetoric has a
2,500 year history during which it has developed ways of analysing
the ethos – the characteristic spirit and beliefs – of speakers (easily
transferred to the analysis of literary narrators and even the analysis
of literary authors); analysing the speakers’ ethical, emotional and
intellectual effects (easily transferred to a concern for a literary work’s
effects on readers); and analysing a vast array of figures of speech
(which required no transfer techniques at all but could be incorporated
in their entirety into literary analysis).

Belles-lettres

Finally, the tradition of belles-lettres included not only literary works
that were treasured and studied but also the fine writing about these

Teaching & Learning English Literature

treasured texts produced by well-educated readers, whose own
refinements of sensibility and literary talent often rivalled the sensibil-
ity and talent of the writers in whose praise they wrote. Belles-lettristic
writing about literature developed the model of a thoughtful person
sitting down with a literary work of life-long acquaintance and writing
his or her reactions to that work, often in an impressionistic way but
also in a way informed by additional reading that was both wide and
deep, intelligence that was flexible and far ranging, thoughtfulness
that tended to concentrate on moral issues central to the universal task
of making a life, and an analytical sensibility that was not professional
in orientation but nevertheless powerfully attentive to literary details,
nuances, tones and linguistic suggestiveness of all sorts. Horace,
Cicero, Petrarch, Philip Sidney, Dryden, Samuel Johnson, Montaigne,
William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Matthew Arnold, Virginia Woolf, F. R.
Leavis, Edmund Wilson, C. S. Lewis, Lionel Trilling – these are some
of the writers who in the belles-lettristic tradition helped develop the
model of a particular kind of literary responsiveness that became an
important strand in the intellectual, professional and historical devel-
opment of the discipline of English Literature.

When these four models of linguistic and literary study were pulled
together to form the intellectual foundation for the first departments
of English Literature near the end of the nineteenth century, it was to
be expected (and was, indeed, the case) that the departments at first
found their interests and their methodologies deeply tinctured by the
intellectual roots from which they drew. However, the very fact that
the departments were founded as academic enclaves unto themselves
meant that inevitably the study of literature would begin to profes-
sionalise, subdivide and specialise itself on the model of the other
academic disciplines for which subdivision, specialisation and profes-
sionalisation had already proved a spectacular means of both making
and measuring intellectual progress. These were also ways of making
careers; it became incumbent on academics to make themselves
successful because literary study in the modern research university
became a way of making a living, not just a habit or a manner of living.

Specialisation

The importance of literary theory today is in large part the conse-
quence of a straight path of development along lines of specialisation,

Teaching literary theory and teaching writing

subdivision and professionalisation that began nearly a hundred years
ago. What specialisation and professionalisation had already accom-
plished in the Sciences and other academic disciplines they have also
accomplished in the discipline of Literature: an upward ratcheting of
sophisticated analytical methods, vastly higher standards than in the
past for uses of argument and evidence, the development of ever more
specialised terms and concepts, the development of ever smaller
domains of inquiry accompanied by deeper and deeper studies within
those narrowed domains, the development of professional peer review
of new ideas and of appropriately oriented journals for the constant
display of new notions. In short, ‘progress’, when progress is defined
as that which advances the intellectual professionalisation of the
discipline.

Theory, then, is a way of specialising the study of literature such

that only professionals can do it (in the sense of making a career of it).
It is also the case that certain large historical and political develop-
ments liberated literary study from its historical roots and not only
hastened its professionalisation but made that professionalisation
easier to accomplish and, moreover, imparted to contemporary criti-
cism some of its special attitudes and concerns. Scientific positivism,
for example, emerging at the end of the nineteenth century, helped
throw the older, belles-lettristic study of literature into question. But
the loss of credibility that old-fashioned literary study suffered on this
front was nothing to the credibility it lost after the carnage of the First
and Second World Wars, and then the world’s horror as the facts
about the Holocaust emerged. For one consequence of the historic
dislocations, catastrophic losses of life and moral disgust provoked by
these events was a profound disillusionment with all the forces that
seemed responsible for making a world in which such horrors were
possible. Literary study seemed to be one of those forces, and a special
kind of fury was turned toward traditional forms of literary study
because they had been largely reverential, or at least uncritical, of what
had long been called ‘great literature’. Postwar critics such as George
Steiner and Elie Wiesel have spent the last fifty years impressing on
us that literary study, despite all its traditional promises about refining
readers’ sensibilities and teaching people how to become decent
human beings, had been profoundly feeble in the face of the fierce
nationalisms, ethnic genocides and territorial aggressions that marked
so much of the twentieth century (and in this connection also see
Duguid, 1984).

Teaching & Learning English Literature

The theoretical turn

On the positive side, the specialisation of literary study by means of
theory released an outpouring of intellectual energy, a wide array of
theoretical perspectives that hitherto had been masked by literary
study’s traditional (biographical, philological and ‘intellectual back-
ground’) paradigms. The first of the theoretical perspectives to gain
ascendancy was New Criticism, commonly called ‘close reading’, an
approach primarily worked out in Anglo-American universities, which
began to be developed in the second decade of the twentieth century,
enjoyed its heyday in the 1940s and 1950s, coasted on the power of its
inertia during the 1950s and 1960s, and was ultimately replaced by new
theoretical influences emanating from French intellectual initiatives in
philosophy (deconstruction) and anthropology (structuralism). Follow-
ing the demise of New Criticism – dominant for so long partly because
of its teachability and thus perpetuated by succeeding generations of
scholars – a range of approaches was fired into hot flame in what is
known in the profession as ‘the theoretical turn’: phenomenological;
psychoanalytic; feminist; Marxist, historical and political; structural;
deconstruction; queer theory; race and ethnic criticism; a recent
resurgence in ethical criticism . . . – and see Chapter 1 under ‘The
academic agenda’ on the corresponding breadth of the modern
curriculum. Whether theory has produced as much light as heat is a
question that will be answered quite differently by various constituen-
cies in the Humanities and Arts, but there is little doubt that the
theoretical turn has not only generated intense intellectual energy but
has also reshaped more than one of the disciplines. (On different
interpretations of the intellectual history of Literature as a discipline see
the references in Chapter 1, note 1; also, see Knights (2005) for an
illuminating account of the theoretical shifts that took place in the 1930s
and 1980s and their impact on pedagogy and students’ identities.)

Literary theory, then, became a way of doing two things. It became

a way of ceasing to offer old-fashioned exhortations about the value of
literature as such, thus removing Literature as a target of attack by
those disillusioned with traditional studies of all sorts. It also became
a way, starting around 1970, of both appropriating and expressing that
disillusionment itself. In other words, the attacks on Literature, the
accusation that it had been complicit in all of the world’s forms of
oppression – gender oppression, colonialism, racism, ethnic stereotyp-
ing, bourgeois glorification, etc. – was a set of accusations that literary

Teaching literary theory and teaching writing

theorists since 1970 (as opposed to many of those who considered
themselves traditional literature teachers) themselves embraced and
found ways in different theoretical perspectives to advance. The
energy released by these new approaches has either swept all forms of
opposition before it – remember the ‘culture wars’? – or has forced any
would-be opposition to accommodate itself somehow to the theoretical
turn the discipline has taken (see Gregory, 1997). As a magazine
cigarette ad targeted at women used to say, ‘We’ve come a long way,
baby!’ What the implications are of this long way we’ve come, for
teachers and students of Literature, is the question at issue here.

PPROACHING THE TEACHING OF THEORY AND CRITICISM

A common response to the ‘position’ of theory just outlined is to see
its aggressive ascendancy as a phase in the development of the
discipline: that with greater understanding of the conditions of its
genesis (both historical and professional), with some distance from
those conditions and in the light of contemporary circumstances we
may come to take a more dispassionate view of things. Indeed,
something like this seems to be expressed by those who insist that as
teachers our interest should be in the range of theoretical perspectives
that can be brought to bear on literature, rather than in adherence to
any particular theoretical approach or theory. On this view, a literary
theory provides directions for an interpretative approach to the text
that, like all such perspectives, allows some things to be seen and
certain kinds of questions to be asked, while others are obscured from
view but may come into focus through the lens of a different theory.
At bottom, the argument goes, what undergraduates need to under-
stand is that all literary interpretations and judgements derive from
certain presuppositions: that even as simple a judgement as ‘the
ending of this novel (short story, film, TV play) is so unrealistic’ is
underpinned by theoretical suppositions about the imitative function
of art, and what might seem to students a spontaneous response
(‘That’s disgusting!’) goes back to ethical theories of art as old as Plato.
(‘Just reading the words on the page’ is, as we all now realise, a theory
in itself – or at least a view based on a theory about the denotational
transparency of semantic meanings – and one that should be treated
as a theory in the classroom.) In short, it is the teacher’s job to help
students become aware of their critical presuppositions and practices.

Teaching & Learning English Literature

So the question is, not whether we should teach literary theory and
criticism – that’s the long way we’ve come – but how much/what
theory should we teach? And when, and how, should it be taught? The
answers to these questions undoubtedly vary between different
cultures and their educational traditions.

Culture-based differences

In the USA, for instance, theory instruction since the mid-1960s has
mostly been experienced in graduate, not undergraduate, classes. It is
not the case that theory hasn’t entered the undergraduate classroom at
all, but it is the case that teachers of undergraduates are much less sure
what to do with it than graduate-school teachers – how much theory
to teach, when to introduce it, how technical to become, and so on.
Undergraduate programmes of education in the USA, moreover, are
influenced strongly by the liberal arts aims of what many American
institutions call ‘core’ requirements. The core curriculum in most
universities often takes a traditional approach to literature as the
approach most congenial to a liberal arts orientation, which is not
deeply compatible with the professionalisation implied by theory
instruction. In graduate school, by contrast, the more theory you can
give your students the better, and the supporting argument looks like
a simple syllogism: graduate school is professional training in the
discipline; the discipline is agog with love of theory; therefore you
can’t teach too much theory. If there is more to the story than this,
most people in graduate schools, teachers and students alike, are not
interested in it.

But when the typical teacher of undergraduates walks in and faces

a class of students, it is certainly the case that most of the students,
including the English majors, will not be steering for careers in
academe but for careers in business, government, corporations and
various forms of public service. Within this teaching context it is much
less clear whether literature instruction ought to be shaved to make
room for theory instruction, and the basic issue of what students will
find more valuable over the years – learning about literature or
learning about criticism – pushes many teachers who loved theory in
their own graduate training to wonder whether they should yield the
time it takes to teach it in their undergraduate classrooms. In short,
literature teachers may wonder what purposes literary theory serves in
undergraduate education. If choice must be made, it may be seen as

Teaching literary theory and teaching writing

The evidence from this survey is that in UK English departments ‘Critical/Literary theory
is the most widely taught compulsory course’ – in the case of all other courses ‘the
number of optional courses is greater than the number of compulsory courses’ (p. 70).
For specialist Literature students, this kind of course was compulsory in 62 per cent of
the departments at Level 1, and in 34 per cent of departments at Level 2 and above
(p. 47).

The survey also collected data about how popular with students all courses were

when offered as options. In only six of the departments was Critical/Literary theory
reported as being ‘very popular’ with students – well behind courses in Shakespeare,
Women’s writing, American literature and most of the post-medieval period courses
(p. 57).

More respondents were dissatisﬁed with their students’ knowledge of ‘theoretical

approaches to literature’ on graduation than any other aspect of their learning – closely
followed by dissatisfaction with their ‘close reading’ (p. 74).

(Halcrow Group et al., 2003)

IGURE

3.1

Courses in theory/criticism: UK English Subject Centre survey,
2002.

preferable to teach the classic texts (Plato, Aristotle, Sidney, Dryden,
Arnold, Eliot) because contemporary criticism, while necessary for
academic professionals in the discipline, will not be useful to all the
students not on the academic track. The classic texts, however, are
liberally educational and are thus important for a students’ general
understanding of self, others and art. In any case theory is more often
worked into the range of courses offered, as part of the discourse
(the way the teacher of ‘Araby’, for instance, introduced the concept
of ‘narrative technique’ into the discussion) rather than seen as a set
of tools only opened up for special jobs on special occasions –
apart perhaps from an elective course such as ‘History of Literary
Criticism’.

The situation in Australia, continental Europe and the UK is

somewhat different. There, ‘learning about literature’ is seen as
necessarily involving ‘learning about criticism’ and, hence, about
literary theory – regardless of students’ future career intentions.
Reading and criticism are not generally regarded as separable activ-
ities: literary theory is pursued as a study of the problems that are
inevitably thrown up by serious reading and discussion of literature,
and is therefore seen as informing all parts of the curriculum (see
Figure 3.1). Often it will be accessed through the work of particular
theorists and critics in relation to certain literary works, within a
course on, say, the Romantic Poets (for instance, see the sample

Teaching & Learning English Literature

syllabuses in Appendix 3(b) and (c) on the book’s website:
www.sagepub.co.uk/chambers.pdf). But literary theory is increasingly
offered as a separate area of study in the undergraduate curriculum
(often compulsorily, as a core study even at First level), in a course on
the history of literary criticism – encompassing the approaches,
theories and methods of influential critics and critical movements both
classic and modern – or in a ‘theory only’ course (see the Higher
Education Academy English Subject Centre website ‘Seminars in
Theory and Practice: English Subject Centre Working Paper’, at http:/
/www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/events/archive/seminars/index.
htm: accessed February 2003). Even in the latter type of course,
practice varies. One theory course may offer an introduction to
Formalism, Poststructuralism, Marxism, New Historicism and Post-
colonialism, while another explores concepts and themes such as text
and context, discourse, the subject, representation, ideology, the
unconscious, gender and race, drawing on the work of a range of
theorists and critics.

But although in general teachers in Europe may be less concerned

about what purposes literary theory serves in undergraduate educa-
tion, they may be as doubtful as their North American counterparts
about how best to teach works of literary theory and criticism. And,
undoubtedly, these texts take some teaching. Often, this is the least
well taught of any aspect of literary studies and the part of the
curriculum that is among the least congenial to students. Many
undergraduates find theoretical and critical texts just very difficult to
understand, first because these discourses are profoundly unfamiliar
to them and, since such texts are not normally written for students at
all but for academic peers, also because the particular texts they study
tend to be abstract and/or technical. Added to such intrinsic difficulty,
students often have very little idea what to do with the theories once
they have (to whatever degree) understood them: how to apply
theoretical-critical ideas to literary texts. So, the student ‘researching’
a paper may end up citing critics working from very different
theoretical perspectives as if they had the same or similar aims and
purposes. They simply don’t recognise that the feminist critic who
takes Mark Twain to task for ‘reinscribing patriarchy’ is conducting a
quite different critical discourse from the humanist critic who honours
Twain for his ‘moral vision’ in showing Huck Finn’s developing
conscience. Another main difficulty for teachers, then, is how to teach
students to apply appropriately the theories and critical texts they

Teaching literary theory and teaching writing

study to the literary works they study. Such application, too, needs to
be taught. The question is, how is this kind of teaching to be tackled?

EACHING THEORY AND CRITICISM

When we recall the conditions of ‘good’ teaching discussed in Chapter 2
– that the teacher intends to bring about learning (i.e. understanding);
indicates or exhibits what is to be learnt; does so in ways that are
intelligible to, and within the capacities of, the learners; engages and/or
extends students’ interest and enthusiasm for the subject – it seems that
teaching theory and criticism represents the worst-case scenario! As
regards content, courses in theory or with a theoretical/critical
emphasis need to be planned especially carefully, with an eye to the
theoretical orientations and texts to be taught or to the selection of
critical texts and literary works and the balance between them. A
complicating factor is that in these courses, in the UK often taught by a
number of academics or by a team, teachers tend to disagree about
which approaches and texts to include because, as we have seen, within
the profession such matters are contentious. Furthermore, the method of
teaching will need careful consideration. Indeed, ‘good teaching’ may
require that a range of methods is employed: students’ independent
reading of theoretical/critical texts; the lecture (mainly for explication of
the theory, exploring some of its central concepts and terms at an
appropriate level of difficulty); seminar/classroom or online discussion
(towards deeper understanding and especially for the application of
theory, offering the stimulation of working with others and encouraging
independent thought); and writing workshops addressing the particu-
lar difficulties involved in writing essays incorporating critical perspec-
tives. (On these difficulties see Smallwood (2002), in which the author
also argues the case for ‘a new approach’ to teaching criticism in
undergraduate literature and cultural studies courses, and an earlier
paper (Smallwood, 1997) on the various meanings of ‘theory’ itself.
Hopkins (2001) and Barry (2003) are books for students.)

Thinking about how to tackle all this here, expeditiously and

unpretentiously, we will first explore some of these problematic issues
and canvass a range of possible teaching solutions, and then propose
an overarching or ‘framing’ approach to teaching theory and criticism
that seems to us to address at least some of the students’ main
difficulties.

Teaching & Learning English Literature

Teaching theoretical and critical texts

Acknowledging the difficulty

If the majority of our beginning students have not read any, or many,
theoretical/critical works before – and there is evidence to suggest
that, in the UK at least, probably this is the case (see Smith’s survey
(2004), in which around only a quarter of students felt ‘well prepared’
for this kind of reading) – then we should surely just accept that they
will find it difficult. They are likely to be unfamiliar with even the most
basic conventions of theoretical-critical discourse: unaware of who is
‘speaking’ to whom, why and about what. And they may well be
distracted, and depressed, by the frequent references in such writings
to further theoretical positions or critics and to literary works they
have never even heard of, let alone read. So it may be helpful to
introduce theoretical-critical writing as a specific text genre, accom-
panied by some explicit discussion of the conventions at work and of
how to approach and read these texts: that is, emphasising the
importance of reading slowly, to grasp ideas, of not expecting to
understand ‘all at once’; of the value of supplying one’s own concrete
instances and examples to aid understanding while reading; and of
re-reading. Indeed, in terms of genre this is a lot more like reading a
philosophical than a literary work. To begin with, it will be helpful if
the teacher actually models this process for the students – showing
them, by talking them through (out loud in class, on tape for
independent study or in writing online) the way she goes about the
task of reading and understanding a representative text or section of
text; and especially how she negotiates a way through ‘unfamiliar’
references of all kinds, always keeping her eye on the main line of
argument as it develops. Then, at least, the students will begin to
understand what kind of text they are faced with, may have more
appropriate expectations of it and will have some clue as to how to go
about the job of reading, assimilating and applying it.

Against this is the view that to present ‘theory’ as something new to

the students, however gently, may be counterproductive, mainly
giving rise to (even greater) trepidation. Rather, the teacher might
work from the basis of students’ existing knowledge and experience
so that they begin to grasp a theoretical concept in the context of
literary examples they themselves generate, before they discover the
theory’s ‘name’ and provenance. For instance, students may be asked
to think of a poem they like and know well, and then to try to explain

Teaching literary theory and teaching writing

what it is about the poem that especially appeals to them. Depending
on the characteristics they identify (of form, mood or whatever), in the
ensuing discussion the teacher may move towards identifying the
students’ (theoretical) interest as mainly formal, expressive and so on
(see the discussion of ‘When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be’ in
Appendix 2 on the book’s website: www.sagepub.co.uk/chambers.
pdf). This could well be a helpful approach, and certainly emphasises
how important the students’ understanding is from the outset, but it
looks as if it might take quite some time to get the enterprise off the
ground. In any case, it seems to us that these approaches to the
problem of intrinsic difficulty are not mutually exclusive and may
profitably be combined. Working from ‘where the students are’ is
almost always a productive strategy initially, but moving fairly swiftly
towards the idea of literary-critical writing as a genre need not inspire
great terror – quite the reverse if the message is a calming one: this is
just another genre, not an impenetrable mystery, and its ‘rules’ can be
learned and understood. However, employing any such strategy to
good effect depends upon the teacher first having acknowledged the
difficulties involved in this kind of study, and her or himself
understanding what they are.

‘Preparing’ to understand

Setting a theoretical/critical text or extract for students to study
independently prior to a lecture or seminar devoted to it is valuable in
that it gives the students the opportunity to see what they can do for
themselves. If, as one would expect, they become more competent over
time then that inspires confidence and probably also boosts their
enthusiasm for this kind of study. Even if such independent work is a
bit too much of a challenge to begin with, it at least enables the
students to identify some questions they will need to raise, safe in the
knowledge that they will likely be able to rectify any gross misappre-
hensions or get some discussion of their difficulties in the course of the
ensuing lecture or seminar. When setting a text for independent study
it is helpful also to pose a few questions that the students should strive
to answer as/after they read. This tends to focus the mind, and makes
reading an active process (of seeking out some answers) rather than a
somewhat aimless ‘comprehension exercise’. Well chosen questions
can make the task of reading easier too, by helping students to focus
on the essentials of the argument and so avoid getting completely lost
in its thickets and byways.

Teaching & Learning English Literature

‘Engaging’ to understand

Seminars or class discussions can be especially engaging of students’
attention, and interesting, provided of course that they are well
focused (as we saw in the ‘Araby’ vignette in Chapter 2). In
particular, they may encourage the students to explore the theories
they have been reading about as they hear the way other students,
learners like themselves, interpret and use the new concepts in their
thinking and as, in the process, they find their own understandings
challenged, extended or refined. Later on, they might be encouraged
to enter into explicit, more structured argument with each other.
They might ‘debate’ a topic or text (either self-chosen or teacher-
appointed) from different theoretical standpoints, with the seminar
group/class divided into two (or more) groups for the purpose and
the debate conducted more or less formally. This strategy can also be
used to help students practise applying different theoretical ap-
proaches to a given literary work. Whatever form such argumenta-
tion takes, it can help students to explore theoretical concepts in
greater depth and to develop their own critical ‘voices’. And oral
presentations, seminar performance and associated work can be
assessed just as evidence of knowledge and understanding in written
assignments can be assessed (see Chapter 6) – perhaps providing a
further incentive for the students to take this aspect of their studies
seriously.

The conversion syndrome

The ultimate aim of all this teaching will be to engender in students
themselves a critical stance to what they study and so discourage what
might be called the ‘conversion syndrome’. Here, rapturously confus-
ed and anxious students happen upon some theoretical or critical
work they manage to understand without too much difficulty, and
immediately become zealots or dogmatists of that particular approach
– often not because they are really convinced of its superiority, but
because at least they feel they can discuss it without appearing foolish.
Another bad effect of poor teaching of theoretical/critical texts is that
the students feel so resentfully confused they become cynical about
theory and criticism altogether. Or, perhaps worst of all, they end up
feeling deeply inadequate, when really they have not been taught
enough to begin to make sense of what they are expected to read and
apply.

Teaching literary theory and teaching writing

Teaching the application of literary theory

In the type of course in which theory is taught alongside literary
works, with a focus on its application to those works, a major difficulty
is achieving some satisfactory balance between, on the one hand, study
of theoretical and critical texts and, on the other, reading literary
works – and both kinds of activity are time-consuming, if for different
reasons. At the extreme, the theory-loving teacher lets theory take
over, become more important than the literature, become very
technical, and gives students the impression that literary study is not
literary study at all but critical study instead, thus ensuring that all but
a very few students tune out. Even when a teacher is on his or her
guard against such overkill, in view of the time needed for reading
and understanding the theoretical/critical texts themselves, applica-
tion of critical concepts to literary works may anyway tend to be
squeezed out.

One theoretical orientation, many literary texts?

A ‘solution’ to this dilemma is to narrow down the theoretical
approaches studied in the course so that theoretical/critical works
within one orientation only may be explored in seminars before being
discussed in relation to a range of literary works. But, say the teacher
decided to restrict himself to teaching the ‘expressive’ theoretical
orientation, focusing on relationships between text and author, there
would still be a number of theories and a host of critics to choose
among – including all of biographical criticism, psychological
(psychoanalytical and Jungian) criticism based on theories about the
creative process, some feminist approaches and even some Lacanian
psychology. What to include?

In any event, the students may get the impression that the chosen

orientation is the one favoured and espoused by the teacher (and,
indeed, it may be). If, furthermore, the teacher applies that approach
without having positioned it intellectually among alternative or
competing orientations then what the students experience, lacking any
larger picture, is criticism as prejudice – indeed, as a series of
prejudices they learn as they migrate from one teacher to another. The
student may become a convert of the chosen approach or reject it, but
what she will not become is thoughtful and critical about either the
strengths or the limitations of any of them.

Teaching & Learning English Literature

Many theoretical orientations, one literary text?

Alternatively, a range of theoretical orientations might be studied and
each one applied to the same literary work – which would certainly
reduce the time the students need to spend reading. But it will also
reduce the extent of their reading of literature, without which they
often lack any sense of how theory may possibly apply. People
studying theory who have not read much literature tend to stock rather
than assimilate their knowledge of theory. Thus, in reading a Shake-
speare play or sonnet, a Burgess novel or a Restoration comedy, the
student is likely to send messages to his mental warehouse calling for
a certain tonnage of feminist or Marxist or formalist edicts from the
available stock, which he dumps like concrete slurry into a big hole of
literary inexperience where, alas, the crude opinions tend to harden
into non-negotiable utterances that are solid, massive, ugly and
depressing, like Moscow apartment blocks built in the Soviet era.
Some of the problems of the conversion syndrome, then – dogmatism
and zealotry – that we identified earlier as occurring if theory is not
taught can also occur as a consequence of theory’s being taught. It looks
like you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. At this
point, however, we’ll step into the breach to propose a way of
approaching the teaching of literary theory and criticism that we think
takes care of at least some of these difficulties.

‘Framing’ the study of theories and criticism

We have just seen the dangers involved in trying to teach literary
theory without attending to a range of theoretical approaches. And
we’ve seen the difficulties of trying to teach students whose know-
ledge of literature is quite limited how to apply the theories and
criticism they study to a breadth of literary works. Both activities are
made more problematic because time for teaching (and study) is short,
so we are aware that our framing suggestion must not add to the
curriculum unduly if it is to be practicable and helpful. In brief, what
we propose is that teachers might introduce their students to a
simplified ‘map’ of theoretical orientations to literature so that, from
early in their studies, the students have some idea from what direction
the various critics they study are ‘coming at’ the literary text, which is
positioned in the middle of the map.

The map presented in Figure 3.2 is our map. If you take up the map

idea you may well want to construct your own, and because your own,

Teaching literary theory and teaching writing

IGURE

3.2

A map of theoretical orientations.

better, map. You will notice that an orientation that would not place
the literary text at the centre of any map is missing here; ‘deconstruc-
tion’ may also need to be taught. We suggest that introduction to the
theoretical orientations should be conducted at a fairly elementary
level; it should be seen as a bare-bones foundation for the wider and
more detailed study the students will undertake as their education
proceeds. Later on the map will no doubt be discarded for a more
sophisticated representation, perhaps of the student’s own making.

Initially, the attempt is to explore with students the ‘interests’ of

each broad theoretical orientation, so that they can begin to under-
stand its ‘point of view’ on the text. In each case, this understanding
may be enhanced by the students’ reading of quite short extracts the
teacher selects from some representative theorists and from critics who
work within that orientation. From there, the teacher may move into
the regular syllabus, setting theoretical/critical readings and applying
them to particular literary works – but always returning to the
(evolving) map to make sure that the students know the provenance
of the readings before getting stuck into them. Progressively, the
strengths and limitations of the various theoretical orientations may be

Teaching & Learning English Literature

discussed explicitly, and in the context of the light they shed on works
of literature (that is, in the context of their application). In such a way
the students may be helped to see the different interests, strengths and
limitations of particular theoretical orientations, and all of them to some
extent, and will be correspondingly less likely to become either
disciples of one or another approach or sceptics about theory in general.

It remains to be seen how such a framing map might actually be

taught. By a foundational bare-bones account we mean something like
the ‘tutorial discussion’ of the theoretical orientations and their
application that takes place between a few students and a teacher, to
be found in Appendix 2 on the book’s website (www.sagepub.co.uk/
chambers.pdf).

In the tutorial the teacher makes ‘possible responses’ to the student’s

questions and remarks because, by its nature, small-group tutorial
discussion can be more relaxed and free-flowing than larger, whole-
class sessions such as we saw enacted in Chapter 2. This, we think,
makes the tutorial an appropriate teaching format for exploratory
work over difficult terrain with relatively inexperienced students (even
if it is harder to employ in these days of large classes and dwindling
resource for teaching). The implication of the teacher’s ‘possible’
response is of course that such a conversation might take a number of
directions. But notice that, as before, the teacher is clearly in control of
the way this conversation develops – for example, in moving it on
from discussion of one orientation to the next so that during the
session all the orientations at least get an airing. We’ll assume that the
notion of the map and its purposes have been introduced in a lecture,
and join the group as the teacher begins to explore the Expressive
orientation. As you read, you may be just as interested in the dynamics
of the small group and the teacher’s role in the discussion as you are
in the content of the session.

As before, the tutor aims to teach well: to engage the students in a

discussion that is intelligible to them, interesting and thought provok-
ing – although whether she or he achieves this is once more for you
to judge.

Some implications

As we said, your map may be different from ours. For instance, we did
not go on to discuss the orientation that would not fit on the map
precisely because it does not make the assumption of a stable literary

Teaching literary theory and teaching writing

text. You may or you may not want to include discussion of
deconstruction: according to Bleich (2001: 127), possibly not, since
these days ‘Critics do not ‘‘deconstruct’’ literature any longer, and
most, in fact, don’t know why they would want to undertake such a
project at all’. But what at least you might do is try this ‘framing’
approach, and see if it works for you and your students. We ourselves
have found that when undergraduates understand the genesis of
different kinds of critical statement about literature, then critical
discourse begins to sound less like static and more like, well . . .
discourse. And more importantly, a form of discourse they can enter,
engage with meaningfully and, increasingly, participate in.

A final point. We remarked that you might be as interested in

thinking about the dynamics of the small group and the teacher’s role
in the discussion as in thinking about the map of theoretical orienta-
tions and the content of the tutorial. What is noticeable in this respect
is that the teacher undoubtedly does most of the talking. Also,
question and answer usually flow between the teacher and one or
another of the students; the students rarely question and respond to
each other. Perhaps you were thinking that the teacher’s style was too
didactic and that she or he should have taken a more ‘student-centred’
approach to the tutorial? We ourselves would say that the teacher’s
style was justified by the introductory nature of the discussion, by the
students’ relative ignorance of the subject matter and by their
understandable reticence, at least until they had the text of the Keats
poem in front of them. In introducing the poem, the teacher both made
the discussion more focused and began to show how theory can be
applied to the literary text. We would also point out that the teacher’s
manner was informal yet unpatronising, and that in his or her
questioning of the students she or he often tried to ‘guide’ them
towards or to elicit an appropriate example or response which could
then be confirmed – a strategy designed to build confidence. Having
said all that, these questions of the teacher’s style and of her or his
relationship to students are of course much debated. They are among
the issues that will be addressed in the second part of the book.

PPROACHES TO TEACHING ACADEMIC WRITING

Following classroom discussion of a short story such as ‘Araby’,
students might well be asked to write an essay on some aspect of it,

Teaching & Learning English Literature

or possibly on several short stories: for example, ‘How does the
treatment of either gender, or sexuality, contribute to the success of
any one or two of the short stories you have studied on this module?’
(see Appendix 3(a) under ‘Coursework Essays’ on the book’s website).
Although the types of assignment that are set in Literature courses are
now quite varied, as we will see (Chapter 6), writing is still the main
focus. This not only reflects the situation of the academy generally,
based as it is on the written mode as the means of codifying
knowledge (enabling analysis of and reflection on it) and of dissemi-
nation,

but also the situation of Literature and other text-based

disciplines and fields in particular (e.g. History, Philosophy, Sociology,
European Studies . . .) in which the essay is still the favoured form of
writing. Accordingly, this is our focus here.

The essay

Above all, the essay form allows students the ‘space’ to construct an
argument (see Mitchell and Andrews, 2000: 9, and in particular the
Introduction on the case for seeing ‘the dialogic principle at the core
of argument (Bakhtin, 1981)’ and on ‘learning to argue’). That is, an
argument that expresses interpretative points of view, using the
appropriate theoretical and analytical concepts and terms – and space
to illustrate that argument and offer evidence in support of it.

When

the teacher marks and comments on the essay, that argument forms
the basis of a ‘dialogue’ between teacher and student. Essay writing,
then, is a main way in which students learn Literature, not just a way
of demonstrating their knowledge and skill and having them graded;
as Taylor et al. put it (1988: 2), writing demands ‘the creation of
meaning and the expression of understanding’. It follows from this
that teaching students to write about literary texts and topics is
teaching them Literature – which, in turn, seems to suggest that it is
an important part of the Literature teacher’s job to teach students to
write. Indeed in the UK, three-quarters of English departments do
teach ‘Essay-writing skills’ at Level 1, and around half do so at Level
2 and beyond (Halcrow Group at al., 2003: 44).

One objection, however, might be that there are aspects of essay

writing that are generic and can be taught by others than literature
teachers – as indeed is the case in many universities world-wide,
where ‘academic support’ units offer all students a drop-in service
and/or a dedicated website,

and may also offer courses on writing

Teaching literary theory and teaching writing

(such as composition classes in the USA) as well as study skills more
widely. In this context, the focus is normally on the conventions of ‘the
academic’ way of writing as an identifiable and distinct form. While
in such courses worked examples of writing may be taken from a
range of disciplines and fields (though rarely from Literature it seems),
these examples are most often used to illustrate general features of
academic writing such as voice, objectivity, structuring, referencing,
etc. This kind of teaching may be very helpful to students who have
little or no knowledge of the academy and we certainly do not mean
to denigrate it, but arguably it hardly touches the deeper purposes of
writing in the discipline or the particularities of the discipline’s
practices.

Models of academic writing

Broadly, there are three main conceptions of academic writing in
currency (Lea and Street, 1998): ‘skills’, ‘academic socialisation’ and
‘academic literacies’ models.

Skills

On this model, writing is regarded mainly as a technical and
instrumental skill or set of skills in which individual students may be
more or less deficient. Teaching aims to fix the students’ ‘problems’,
often through advice about structuring the essay into stages (introduc-
tion, main body, conclusion), for example, and attention to grammar,
spelling and other ‘surface’ features of writing: as Crowther et al.
(2001: 4) have argued, ‘the policy discourse within the UK and the
wider world is premised on a basic skills model that prioritises the
surface features of literacy and language’. These skills are assumed to
be fairly unproblematically ‘transferable’ to the students’ disciplinary
studies.

Academic socialisation

By contrast, in this model (drawing on the work of the Student
Learning movement referred to at the start of the chapter), writing is
seen as a medium through which students represent their knowledge
and understanding. Here the focus is on ‘inducting’ students into the
new academic culture, with an emphasis on their orientation to study,
their understanding of what it means to ‘learn’ and their interpretation
of assignment tasks. As in the study skills model, however, the aim is

Teaching & Learning English Literature

that students should align their understandings and adapt their
practices to those of the academy and the discipline (in both cases
understood as monolithic); little attention is paid to the varieties of
writing required even within a single discipline, to contestation within
the discipline, to writing as a social practice, to uncertainties students
may feel about their identity as writers, or to issues of power and
authority in the student–teacher–institution matrix.

Academic literacies

All these matters are foregrounded in the academic literacies model,
which will be our focus in what follows. In taking this model as our
focus we do not mean to overlook or underestimate all the excellent
work done in the long-standing tradition of composition teaching in
the US. However, approaches to teaching writing that are closer to the
academic literacies model appear to be increasingly adopted within
that tradition too (see, for example, Bizell, 1982; Bleich, 2001; Crowley,
1999): that is, the work of ‘outer-directed theorists’ who, drawing on
Linguistics, literary theory and Philosophy, are concerned with the
social context of writing and the influence of particular discourse
communities (as opposed to that of ‘inner-directed theorists’ working
within the framework of cognitive psychological models of the,
decontextualised, individual student). Similarly, in the 1980s in Aus-
tralia, Halliday’s work in applied linguistics became very influential
(e.g. Halliday, 1985), and Ballard and Clanchy (1988), drawing on
Anthropology, focused on relationships between language and cul-
ture. In South Africa, in the midst of fundamental changes in society
and critical reconceptualisation of the purposes and nature of student
writing in the academy, see the work of, for example, Angelil-Carter
(1998) and Thesen (2001). Socio-cultural conceptions of writing such as
these may be especially congenial to teachers of Literature.

However, the academic literacies model does not stand apart from

or in opposition to the study skills or academic socialisation models:

Rather, we would like to think that each model successively encapsulates
the other, so that the academic socialisation perspective takes account of
study skills but includes them in the broader context of the acculturation
processes . . ., and likewise the academic literacies approach encapsulates
the academic socialisation model, building on the insights developed
there as well as the study skills view. The academic literacies model, then,

Teaching literary theory and teaching writing

incorporates both of the other models into a more encompassing
understanding of the nature of student writing within institutional
practices, power relations and identities . . .

(Lea and Street, 1998: 158)

Quite a claim. It rests on the authors’ ethnographic research into
writing practices, informed by theoretical understanding drawn from
functional linguistics and cultural anthropology. Their paper, ‘Student
Writing in Higher Education: An academic literacies approach’, to
which this discussion mainly refers, is based on research in two types
of university in England (‘old’, research-based and ‘new’, post-1992
ex-polytechnics), involving interviews with students and their
teachers, classroom observation and scrutiny of a range of students’
written work along with their teachers’ comments on it.

CADEMIC LITERACIES

The concept of academic literacies as a framework for understanding
writing (and reading) practices is based on the assumption that,
broadly, students will not learn to write well in the academic context
unless they understand the nature and purposes of such writing. More
specifically, students learn to write in particular contexts, of discipline
or field (teachers and institution), and both the nature of knowledge
and writing conventions differ between the various disciplines. Further,
within a discipline, writing does not only reflect or mediate knowledge
but, more fundamentally, constructs it: writing involves making
meaning – and, as we are reminded by Bleich (2001: 120), among
others, ‘language [is] meaningful only within the interpersonal and
collective contexts of its use’: that is, its use among people who are
‘alive, functioning, changing and interacting’. Through writing, then,
students learn not only about the discipline, they also learn to become
members of, or ‘legitimate participants’ in, the disciplinary ‘commu-
nity’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991, 1999). And this endeavour has implica-
tions for a student’s personal and social identity – identities that are
also influenced of course by his or her educational background,
ethnicity, cultural expectations and gender (Ivanicˇ, 1998; Lillis, 2001).

So, in the academic literacies view, students will need some

understanding of the nature of the discipline (as a ‘community of
speakers and writers’) in order to write meaningfully and in accord-
ance with the discipline’s particular requirements and conventions.

Teaching & Learning English Literature

However, Lea and Street argue, the community’s writing practices are
far from transparent, more often understood tacitly by teachers than
made explicit to students. On this point, the researchers note that
although many teachers identified the concepts of ‘structure’ and
‘argument’ as key elements in a successful piece of student writing,
they were not always able to explain just ‘how a particular piece of
writing ‘‘lacked’’ structure’ (p. 162). The authors conclude that
‘underlying, often disciplinary, assumptions about the nature of
knowledge affect the meaning given to the terms ‘‘structure’’ and
‘‘argument’’ ’ – and so, incidentally, even these concepts are not
generic and simply transferable between disciplines. They continue:

We suggest that, in practice, what makes a piece of student writing
‘appropriate’ has more to do with issues of epistemology than with the
surface features of form to which staff often have recourse when
describing their students’ writing

– and, indeed, when commenting on it to the students. Thus, while a
student’s difficulty may actually be lack of familiarity with the subject
matter, in her or his comments the teacher may be directing the
student’s attention to surface writing problems: a prime case of
miscommunication between teacher and taught. And as a result, the
student may (mistakenly) think that these problems are remediable
through ‘generic’ study skills work.

Furthermore, even within the single discipline academic writing

practices are far from homogeneous. Rather, they are contested – just
as conceptions of Literature as a discipline are contested. Thus the
succession of teachers that students encounter as they progress from
course to course may have rather different conceptions of successful
writing in the discipline, and their expectations may differ. Yet each of
these teachers is in a position of ‘authority’ with respect to disciplinary
practices. This no doubt gives rise to even greater confusion among
students. Teachers themselves are also constrained by institutional or
departmental policies, often designed to meet the requirements of
external quality assurance and other agencies. Lea and Street provide
a telling example of this, arguing that the effects of multidisciplinarity
and modularisation on students only compound the difficulties they
face as they attempt to ‘switch’ between the demands of one
disciplinary setting and set of teachers to another. (See Chapter 6 for
further discussion of this and of issues of power and authority in the

Teaching literary theory and teaching writing

context of student assessment, including as regards plagiarism.) The
authors’ critique of writing practices in the disciplines is compelling;
what they do not attempt, however, is to draw out the implications of
their research for teachers.

RITING PEDAGOGY

Let’s say that one of our main pedagogic aims early on in the students’
higher education in Literature is to teach them to write a ‘good’ essay.
There are of course a number of ways in which we might go about
this, including discussion about the purposes of essay writing based
on the students’ existing experience; direct instruction (e.g. about
structuring essays); setting practice exercises on various aspects of
writing; critiquing sample essays, and so on. That is, as we saw earlier,
our aim (of teaching students to write well) does not of itself
determine the precise content of our teaching, the methods of teaching
we will use or when we might use them. In this case, such matters will
depend on our conception of writing which, in turn, rests on our
understanding of the context of its use (the discipline). If our
conception of writing is of a socio-cultural, broadly academic literacies
kind, then a main concern will be the students’ understanding of the
particular context of the academic discipline Literature, located as it is
within the academy, which is likely to privilege some teaching
methods and content over others. Starting out with direct instruction
about ‘correct’ surface features of language or the academic voice that
should be adopted is unlikely to meet the case, for example, while
certain more heuristic methods may well be preferred.

Heuristic exercises

Certainly educators in this tradition value students’ exploring, with
them and with peers, their past experiences of writing. They might
then proceed to discussion of the differences between those forms of
writing and the forms required in the new situation of discipline and
academy. For instance, they are likely to set exercises in which
students are asked to identify different ‘types’ of writing from a set of
given extracts, and to articulate the differences of form, structure and
language feature on which their discriminations are (whether they
know it or not) based – with, in this case, particular attention to the
essay type. The students might also be asked to ‘mark’ and comment

Teaching & Learning English Literature

on given, anonymised, student essays. All such activities are likely to
precede constructive writing exercises in the new academic context.
Teaching Academic Writing (Coffin et al., 2003) includes a series of such
exercises that teachers may adapt to their purposes and, similarly,
Writing at University: A Guide for Students (Crème and Lea, 1977;
second edition, 2003) and The Arts Good Study Guide (Chambers and
Northedge, 1997) – books that, although written for students, have
been plundered by teachers for ideas and materials to use with their
students. Also see Evans (1995) for uses of workshops, syndicates, etc.,
and other practical matters.

These educators, then, ‘conceptualise successful teaching and learn-

ing as ‘‘scaffolded’’ activity, whereby lecturers actively support and
guide students’ participation in knowledge-making practices (Bruner,
1983; Vygotsky, 1978)’:

In the process of scaffolding, a more advanced ‘expert’ or ‘teacher’ is seen
as helping a less-experienced student to learn to do a particular task so
that the learner can replicate the process alone at some point in the
future. For successful scaffolding to take place, lecturers need to know
where the student is starting from and aiming for in the process of
learning. A key aspect of this scaffolding . . . is raising students’
awareness of the conventions within which they are expected to write and
then helping students to add these conventions to their linguistic and
rhetorical repertoires.

(Coffin et al., 2003: 12)

Constructive writing exercises

Following the kind of ‘awareness raising’ gained through heuristic
exercises such as those just outlined, Coffin et al. (2003: 34) recommend
a process approach to constructive writing (and see Murray, 1987). That
is, like Mitchell and Andrews (2000) on arguing, they regard the doing
of writing as the appropriate focus. Although a number of ‘stages’ of
the essay-writing process are identified, they are regarded as iterative:
the stages are overlapping and may occur in various orders. Neverthe-
less, students may be taught and asked to practise each of the stages
as separate activities in an overall process of writing an essay, the final
outcome or product (see Figure 3.3). Once an essay has been produced
the student can then learn from the teacher’s comments on it and
ensuing discussion about it (‘feedback’ from teacher to student is
discussed in Chapter 6).

Teaching literary theory and teaching writing

( Pre-writing – understanding the ideas of others, generating ideas, collecting

information: note-making, brainstorming (accessing tacit knowledge), ‘journaling’,
freewriting (see Elbow, 1998).

( Planning – organising and focusing ideas: mindmapping or clustering (graphic

organising techniques), listing, outline planning.

( Drafting – writing initial drafts: focusing on the development, organisation and

elaboration of ideas (i.e. a focus on making meaning).

( Reﬂecting – letting work sit, thinking, coming back to it later.

( Peer or tutor reviewing – feedback from others (peer-reviewers will need guidance

in how to offer helpful feedback), whether offered in class or informally.

( Revising/additional research, idea generation – acting on feedback; further

developing and clarifying ideas, structuring the text.

( Editing and proofreading – focusing attention on the surface features of the text,

including linguistic accuracy, layout, footnotes and references; polishing.

(Adapted from Cofﬁn et al., 2003: 33–43)

IGURE

3.3

Process approach: stages of essay writing.

In reality, all of these stages might not be needed in a given writing

task. For instance, if the essay topic were text-based and the text(s) had
been the subject of discussion in seminars then brainstorming might
not be necessary; if the assignment were summative and a main
component of the grade for the course, peer review might be
discouraged. However, all of the stages can be taught – in discussion
(classes, seminars) and perhaps especially in dedicated writing work-
shops. Practice constructive-writing sessions are very often designated
‘workshops’, drawing attention to the fact that they involve activity of
various kinds: that students and teacher roll up their sleeves and get
down to work. As work proceeds, the activities may become more
sophisticated, for example addressing meta-discursive matters such as
signposting text structure (exploring ways of signalling agreement or
qualification, recapping and summarising).

Making it real

As all we have said here suggests, constructive writing exercises such
as these are valuable to the extent that they are ‘real’ tasks, appro-
priately contextualised: that is, grounded in understanding of the
disciplinary context in which they are set, its requirements and
conventions, typical of the writing tasks encountered in that context,
and timely – preferably related to actual assignments the students are

Teaching & Learning English Literature

undertaking so that they are motivated to engage fully with the
activities. These requirements may seem to rule out any ‘generic’
teaching of writing and identify teachers of Literature as fully
responsible for the students’ learning. That is indeed the extreme
position which – even if the preferred one – may simply be
impracticable. However, it may well be possible for members of
student-support staff to work with discipline specialists, at times
perhaps together in the same classroom and at other times separately,
to a carefully orchestrated schedule that exploits the particular
strengths of both parties.

OSTSCRIPT

In this chapter we have seen how two of the most important aspects
of our students’ education in Literature – understanding the role of
literary theory and essay writing – may be taught. This is in addition
to the teaching of close reading exemplified in Chapter 2. All three
processes are regarded as problematic; teachers, in the UK at least, are
most concerned about their students’ understanding of them or ability
to perform them upon graduation.

In the process we have tried to model two of the most common

teaching methods employed by literature teachers – the class or
seminar and the tutorial – and we have discussed the main features of
the writing workshop. This first part of the book was addressed
mainly to new or beginning teachers. In the rest of the book, we
examine some of the broader issues and recent thinking surrounding
curriculum and course design, methods of teaching, means of student
assessment and course evaluation. We hope these discussions will
interest all teachers of Literature.

Notes

1. These days it is sometimes argued that the dominance of the written mode is

being challenged by the ‘multimodality’ offered by electronic technologies,
CD-ROMs, etc. (see, for example, Kress, 1998, 2003; Snyder, 2002). However,
most uses of these technologies in the Humanities still rely on written forms –
for example, computer conferencing (even if a hybrid form that incorporates
some features of speech), resource-based study (e.g. text databases), ‘interactive’
text and text ‘searching’.

2. In a very interesting paper on genre and the materiality of language Bleich

(2001) suggests that since ‘argument’ is understood as contestation, in which
the aim is to ‘win’, this is not the appropriate way to conceive of what should

Teaching literary theory and teaching writing

go on. We are not taking a common-sense definition of argument here,
however, but discussing more specific, academic, understandings of the term.
(Nevertheless, Bleich’s own argument is really quite persuasive.)

3. See, for example, the website offered by the University of Southern Queensland,

Australia: http://www.usq.edu.au/opacs/learningsupport/stafflearnsupport/
default.htm (accessed October 2004); and the online Writing Essays Guide
offered by Sheffield Hallam University, UK: http://www.shu.ac.uk/schools/
cs/english/essayguide/enter.htm (accessed March 2004).

Key references

Coffin, C., Curry, M. J., Goodman, S., Hewings, A., Lillis, T. M. and Swann, J.

(2003) Teaching Academic Writing: A Toolkit for Higher Education. London and
New York: Routledge.

Knights, Ben (2005) ‘Intelligence and interrogation: the identity of the English

student’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 4(1): 33–52.

Lea, M. R. and Street, B. V. (1998) ‘Student writing in higher education: an

academic literacies approach’, Studies in Higher Education, 23(2): 157–72.

Websites

HEA English Subject Centre, ‘Seminars in Theory and Practice: English Subject

Centre Working Paper’, at: http://www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/events/
archive/seminars/index.htm

Study skills/writing website, University of Southern Queensland: http://

www.usq.edu.au/opacs/learningsupport/stafflearnsupport/default.htm

Writing Essays Guide, Sheffield Hallam University, UK: http://www.shu.ac.uk/

schools/cs/english/essayguide/enter.htm

Teaching & Learning English Literature

Planning for teaching:

curriculum and course

design

‘M

ODELLING

’

CURRICULUM DESIGN

We saw in Chapter 3 the way English Literature emerged as a new
discipline out of existing literary and intellectual traditions (philology,
classics, rhetoric and belles-lettres) which supplied it with both
contents and pedagogy. And we saw how those roots have shaped the
discipline’s development over time, along with certain forces acting
upon it from within the wider academy (such as long-term trends
towards specialisation and professionalisation) and from socio-politi-
cal changes and events in the world beyond. It was argued there that
the outcome of these combined forces has been the ‘theoretical turn’
the discipline has taken since around 1970, expressed today in a much
wider curriculum and in a range of theoretical orientations. Also,
conceptions of teaching and teaching-learning practices have been as
profoundly affected in recent times. All these changes prompt us to
re-examine some fundamental questions: ‘What should I be teaching,
and why?’, and ‘How should I be teaching?’ These questions arise
whenever there is the possibility of change or of choice. Indeed, can
we call ourselves educators at all unless we address them seriously?

The first questions, which concern our purposes and aims as

educators, mainly impact upon the curriculum and the contents of
courses, the topics of this chapter. (The second question concerns
methods of teaching-learning, the media to be used, the activities
students are asked to engage in and the ways we will assess their work
and progress. These matters are discussed in the following chapters.)
We begin by considering the prevalent, rational or classical, model of

developing curricula and courses of study, with which you may be
familiar. It requires that teachers first determine their curriculum aims
and teaching-learning objectives – from which all else is said to flow.

The ‘rational’, product-oriented curriculum model

In this model the curriculum is defined broadly, as a programme of
study in a particular subject area that is explicitly organised so that the
students of it may achieve certain desired learning aims and objectives –
rather than the narrower common-sense notion of the ‘content’ of what
is taught. Planning the curriculum means first identifying the over-
arching aims of the programme of study: in practice, this means that
as teachers we answer the ‘what should I be teaching, and why?’
questions for ourselves in the light of our knowledge and experience
of literary study, our understanding of the discipline’s nature and
purposes, our interpretation of the canon, knowledge of our particular
students, and our practical circumstances.

From such overarching programme aims, in linear fashion:

teachers begin to derive particular, achievable teaching-learning
objectives, which mark out the courses or modules that will make
up the programme;

in turn, these objectives suggest appropriate contents for the
courses, and each syllabus is defined accordingly;

the teaching strategies and media of delivery that will best enable
students to meet the learning objectives are then identified, along
with the methods of student assessment that will confirm for
teachers and the students (and, ultimately, prospective em-
ployers) that those objectives have been met;

during teaching and afterwards teachers evaluate the programme
– turn researcher and try to find out how the planned curriculum
works in practice (do the courses make up a coherent ‘whole’,
expressing programme aims in the ways intended? are the
teaching-learning objectives appropriate and achievable? are all
the elements of each course well designed in relation to its
objectives? are the syllabuses fruitful, the courses stimulating and
interesting to the students? are the teaching-learning methods
employed effective, the methods of student assessment appropri-
ate and fair?);

Teaching & Learning English Literature

progressively, teachers feed back the findings of evaluation into
the design process and make appropriate adjustments to any or
all aspects of the programme.

So such a stage-by-stage, linear model of curriculum development
ultimately takes the form of an imaginary circle, with periodic
feedback informing an ongoing process of adjustment or redesign.
And, as we shall see, in all these ‘stages’ of the design teachers must
take into account the requirements of the wider society and university,
and of course the student body.

Creative course design

That, then, is the ‘rational’ model of what teachers do when designing
the curriculum – no doubt an accurate label as regards its reasonable-
ness

but perhaps a rather technical and less than inspiring view of

things? For instance, for many teachers the stage described as ‘defining
the syllabus’ is the creative heart of the process, not only drawing on
their expert knowledge of literature and their understanding of their
students but also on their particular literary passions. Such knowledge
and understanding, combined with the teacher’s value judgements
and enthusiasms, can result in courses that are novel and exciting for
teachers and students alike. And so individual teachers have surely
contributed to widening the literary canon and to the introduction of
the new types of course and emphasis we remarked on earlier –
perhaps especially those of us teaching students from a range of ethnic
backgrounds or who have little previous experience of education in
the discipline, and when we have the opportunity to teach in our
specialist areas of knowledge and can integrate up-to-date research. In
these situations we may feel particularly challenged by the curricular
possibilities and excited and satisfied by the courses we develop.

In what follows we must cling on to the notion of the teacher as

expert and the process of curriculum and course design as a creative
one, as we explore the thickets of ‘regulation’ that as teachers we are
now subject to. This is especially so in the UK where government and
its agencies have gone further than elsewhere towards prescribing
academics’ activities, and for this reason the focus in the chapter is
mainly on UK ‘requirements’. But, as we have seen with regard to
centralising tendencies everywhere, it is a path down which most of
us seem to be heading.

Planning for teaching: curriculum and course design

In the bulk of the chapter our focus will be on planning courses or

modules of study – syllabuses rather than the entire curriculum – on
pragmatic grounds: that, as teachers, we are most likely to find
ourselves responsible for planning and teaching individual courses or
modules of study. But there is another reason for this emphasis too.
VanZanten Gallagher (2001: 54) has proposed that the literary canon
is ‘a loose, baggy monster, a fluid movement of ebbs and flows, ins
and outs – imaginary, therefore, as opposed to concrete’. What is
concrete, she argues, is the syllabus: the list of works that are
frequently taught in the classroom, ‘a list that is empirically verifiable’
which she calls the ‘pedagogical canon’. Citing Guillory (1993: 28), she
concurs with the view that:

An individual’s judgement that a work is great does nothing in itself to
preserve that work, unless that judgement is made in a certain institutional
context, a setting in which it is possible to insure the reproduction of the
work, its continual reintroduction to generations of readers.

The literary canon, then, ‘emerges from the operations of pedagogical
canons’ – rather than the other way round, as is the conventional
understanding. That is, through their syllabuses teachers ‘produce’ the
literary canon rather than simply applying the (imaginary) canon in their
courses. She concludes that, therefore, ‘The more important question,
from the pedagogical point of view, is how we decide what goes into the
construction of our syllabi’ (VanZanten Gallagher, 2001: 56).

Appendix 3

Shortly we will be looking at some ‘sample’ course designs, presented in
Appendix 3 on the book’s website (www.sagepub.co.uk/chambers.pdf). These
are outline descriptions of three modules within the English Literature curriculum
of an anonymous UK university – one at each of the three levels (or years) of
undergraduate study. Note that the documents have been lightly edited; in
particular, reading lists are not included in full.

A cursory glance will show that these documents, designed for student

consumption at the start of the courses, follow a similar pattern. That is, any
objectives of the course are discussed and issues of course content (syllabus),
timetable, methods of teaching-learning and student assessment are usually
explained thereafter. But the differences among them are perhaps even more
interesting. It will be helpful to read through the documents quite quickly at this
point.

Teaching & Learning English Literature

HE CURRICULUM

The higher education English Literature curriculum, like any curricu-
lum, arises out of demands made by the wider society, out of the
history of people’s attempts to understand a particular aspect of our
experience (here, the discipline Literature), and out of the needs of the
student body. The curriculum is therefore not invariable: as these
constituents change so the curriculum changes.

In Chapter 1 we saw the extent to which many governments now

seek to influence the form and content of all higher education
curricula. For example, throughout much of the West a preoccupation
with national wealth creation in the modern, globalised economy has
prompted a policy of massively increasing student numbers and
focusing on the students’ acquisition of marketable ‘skills’. We also
saw how the student body has changed, becoming markedly more
heterogeneous and including many more mature and part-time
students. In Chapters 1 and 3 we saw how changes in academics’ and
critics’ views of the nature of Literature and the value of literary study
have led to expansion of the ‘traditional’ curriculum: in particular
extending the canon, including a wide range of literary theory and
new types of course (e.g. theme-based, regional literatures, post-
modern perspectives . . .). And in Chapter 2 we saw how a paradigm
shift (via the Student Learning movement) has occurred among
educationalists regarding the focus of their work, from teachers and
teaching to students and their learning, the effects of which are
reverberating around the academy as we write. So, we may well ask,
where does all this leave the people who teach the curriculum?

Demands on the curriculum

Each set of demands is of course difficult to negotiate. The first of
them, the demands made by the wider society, entails our engagement
with (at least) the university’s committee and other structures that
normally act as mediators of the policies of government and its
agencies. And such external demands are often seen as constraining,
not least when resource for teaching is cut, or as an unwelcome
intrusion because inappropriate to the discipline and distorting, or
because trying to meet the demands takes up time that could
otherwise be devoted to teaching literature, to research and to writing.
The second set of demands, arising from within the discipline, is

Planning for teaching: curriculum and course design

always difficult too, given uncertainties surrounding shifting defini-
tions of the discipline’s purposes, scope and emphases, along with
constraints on class time. But the last set of demands is perhaps
especially problematic: how are teachers to know what their students’
needs are, especially today when we are faced with a large, heterogen-
eous body of people? And, in any case, what exactly is meant by ‘need’
in this context?

Students’ needs

When people talk about their need for food and sleep, for a bed to
sleep in or for warmth, or for love and security, we know what they
mean. They are referring to their biological, basic and psychological
needs, respectively; and they are not needs that, as teachers, we can
normally meet. (But perhaps teachers can and should take into account
certain of students’ psychological needs, such as the need to feel
accepted and valued as a student (rather than ‘put down’ or
overlooked), to feel stimulated (rather than reduced to boredom) – and
in current circumstances perhaps we should also try to take account
of the effects of part-time work on the hours students may give to
productive study?) By contrast, ‘need’ in the higher education context
surely refers to something much more specific – to something required
to fulfil a purpose or role that people have chosen for themselves.

Perhaps we can say that these people, students, may need to have

matters explained to them carefully, they will need access to books and
paper, to learn to use a word-processor, access the Internet . . . So far
so good – we can in principle simply offer or provide such opportun-
ities. But these are all things that students are likely to know they need.
What about things that people who have chosen to study Literature do
not know they need, or can only glimpse, in advance of that study?
That is, precisely what they will need to read, do and learn in the
process. As we saw in Chapter 2, all education must (logically, must)
have ‘particular objects (people are setting out to learn something)’,
involving the acquisition of knowledge, understanding and skills that
are seen as desirable and important or useful, to a certain level or
standard (Hirst and Peters, 1970: 81). Who, then, is to be responsible
for determining the students’ needs, as students of Literature, with
respect to acquiring knowledge (etc.) of literary objects that is
important, to the standards required? Of course, the people who do
know what’s involved: subject-expert teachers.

Teaching & Learning English Literature

Cognitive, disciplinary core

Ultimately, then, it is teachers who are responsible for applying the
demands of the wider society to the curriculum, for teaching their
discipline and for determining their students’ needs as students.
Teachers, precisely because of their subject expertise, must be the
pre-eminent determiners of the curriculum – though they may well
discuss aims and objectives with students, and include large elements
of student choice in the programme design (such as the ‘Elective’ course
in Appendix 3(c), the option to write a dissertation on an agreed subject
in place of studying a set course, to choose among texts to be studied
within courses or to undertake project work). Such qualification
notwithstanding, among other things that hang upon this conclusion is
reaffirmation that the core of the academy is cognitive and disciplinary.

We can test out this proposition by applying it to a ‘hard case’: to a

discipline or field at the social/temporal, applied rather than the
cognitive end of the spectrum (see Kelly, 2001, in Chapter 1). For
instance, a formal university course in Caring for the Elderly, while a
practical field, would draw on a range of bodies of thought –
the discipline of Sociology in exploration of the concept ‘institutional-
isation’, on Psychology in discussion of needs (e.g. for ‘personal
space’), on Philosophy (ethics) as regards people’s ‘rights’ (to privacy
for example), and so forth. By contrast, on-the-job training in caring
for the elderly would not take this form. In higher education, then,
even such fields as these are at bottom cognitive and discipline-based.

URRICULUM AIMS

It follows from this conclusion that in higher education curriculum
aims and course objectives are chiefly cognitive, deriving from
consideration of the nature of the discipline or field in question. As
regards our subject, learning Literature is possible only to the extent
that students acquire the network of shared concepts that make
literary experience available and the public forms of discourse that
make it discussable. Higher education, then, is centrally concerned
with public modes of knowledge, understanding and experience. This
does not mean that’s all it is about. But it means that teachers must
keep at the forefront of their minds those processes that are central to
the discipline itself, from which they may derive appropriately
cognitive aims and objectives for their teaching. In Chapter 2 we

Planning for teaching: curriculum and course design

identified processes of textual analysis-interpretation-evaluation, and
of communication, as central to the discipline of Literature.

Cognitive aims

If these processes are understood to be our focus, certain cognitive
aims follow on. Broadly speaking, we propose that as teachers of
Literature we should at least aim to offer our students opportunities to:

learn to read a range of primary texts and text genres appropriate-
ly – in breadth and depth – engaging in associated processes of
textual analysis, interpretation and evaluation;

engage with the concepts and networks of ideas that characterise
literary discourse, and learn to think in terms of them;

grasp the assumptions and purposes that underlie debates (theor-
etical-critical) within the discipline along with the beliefs and
values that inform them;

understand the way argument is conducted within literary
discourse, what counts as evidence and how it is used;

learn to speak and write within the conventions that apply;

take an independent, critical stance to study.

Also, it is most important that students should come to understand
why the knowledge and cognitive skills that make up this list are
important. Often their importance is simply assumed and is not
discussed with the students. But explanations of this kind are not
arcane and need not be impossibly abstract; when they are advanced,
the teacher’s job becomes easier because the students’ sense of ‘what’s
at stake’ in literary study becomes clearer.

Cognitive skills, and values

In developmental terms, for example, the cognitive skills taught by
literary study address one of the most distinctive features that make
human beings what they are: the possession of natural language.
When students are given reason and opportunity to consider that in
the absence of language their humanity would lie mostly locked up
and inaccessible even to themselves, they recognise that working at the
development of this capacity is to work at the fulfilment of an
existential need that is real and demanding. In social terms, the
cognitive skills taught by literary study address the development of

Teaching & Learning English Literature

the one skill upon which more human failure and success is built than
any other: the skill of using language – and responding to others’ use
of language – with precision, vividness, clarity, power, grace, wit and,
most importantly, with success. The skills of language that lead to
these kinds of powerful use can only be acquired by people who
immerse themselves in the medium of language. And no programme
of study addresses the need for language creatures to expand and
empower their language ability more than literary study. (In this
connection, see a thought-provoking article by the philosopher Robin
Barrow, 2004.)

It is also important to remember that our purposes are not

exhausted by curriculum aims such as those just outlined. Many
teachers would frame their aims in the context of long-term benefits to
students that are not primarily related to disciplinary content or skills:
intellectual and ethical outcomes such as to become more open-
minded, introspective, intellectually flexible, creative and curious, to
become better problem-solvers, to imagine more vividly and in more
detail, to become more tolerant of differences, more sensitive to moral
principles and to show greater concern for others, to find joy in
learning for its own sake. These curriculum ‘aims’ impact upon the
person and the quality of a life. They are not so much taught directly
as modelled by teachers; they are the features of mind and character
that students remember about their teachers often well beyond the
years of their higher education – the teachers’ enthusiasm for the
subject, their fairness, their sensitivity to others, their intellectual
playfulness – or not.

But whether or not you agree that the list of cognitive aims just

offered is indeed appropriate to the teaching/study of Literature, a
point to note is that these aims are different from instrumental ones
such as acquiring time management or information technology skills.
Those other skills, however desirable, may be developed only as
students acquire the knowledge, understanding and practices that are
central to the study of Literature. That is, as teachers, we must grasp
the structure or pattern of relationships between curriculum aims so that we
may focus our efforts appropriately.

UBJECT BENCHMARKING

Traditionally, curriculum aims have been established by the head of
the literature department or through departmental discussion, and

Planning for teaching: curriculum and course design

Subject Benchmark statements provide a means for the academic community to
describe the nature and characteristics of programmes in a speciﬁc subject. They also
represent general expectations about the standards for the award of qualiﬁcations at a
given level and articulate the attributes and capabilities that those possessing such
qualiﬁcations should be able to demonstrate . . .

[They] are used for a variety of purposes. Primarily, they are an important external

source of reference for higher education institutions when new programmes are being
designed and developed in a subject area. They provide general guidance for
articulating the learning outcomes associated with the programme but are not a
speciﬁcation of a detailed curriculum in the subject. Benchmark statements provide for
variety and ﬂexibility in the design of programmes and encourage innovation within an
agreed overall framework . . . [They] also provide support to institutions in pursuit of
internal quality assurance. They enable the learning outcomes speciﬁed for a particular
programme to be reviewed and evaluated against agreed general expectations about
standards. Finally, subject benchmark statements are one of a number of external
sources of information that are drawn upon for the purposes of academic review [the
Agency’s arrangements for external assurance of quality and standards] and for
making judgements about threshold standards being met.

(QAA, 2000: 1–2, emphases added)

IGURE

4.1

Purposes of subject benchmarking.

objectives for courses of study very often by the individuals respon-
sible for teaching them. Latterly all such matters have tended to be
more collaborative, with teachers often working in teams and increas-
ingly taking into account students’ views and preferences. However,
now in the UK, the curriculum aims that students are expected to meet
(or the ‘learning outcomes’ they are expected to demonstrate), what-
ever their discipline or field, are defined externally to institutions and
faculties/departments in a Subject Benchmark Statement published by
the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA), a
government agency. The Statement for English is described as ‘the first
attempt to make explicit the general academic characteristics and
standards of an honours degree in this subject area’, and was devised
by the QAA in collaboration with ‘a group of subject specialists drawn
from and acting on behalf of the subject community’ (QAA, 2000: 1;
see Figure 4.1).

In effect – the final sentence of the Statement’s purposes notwith-

standing – unless a literature department can show congruence
between the definitions and standards identified in the Benchmark
Statement and its curriculum, its courses will not be rated highly in

Teaching & Learning English Literature

100

( knowledge of literature [which] should include a substantial number of authors and

texts from different periods of literary history. For Single Honours literature students
this should include knowledge of writing from periods before 1800 . . .;

( knowledge and understanding of the distinctive character of texts written in the

principal literary genres, ﬁction, poetry and drama, and of other kinds of writing
and communication;

( experience of the range of literatures in English . . .;

( appreciation of the power of imagination in literary creation;

( awareness of the role of critical traditions in shaping literary history;

( knowledge of linguistic, literary, cultural and socio-historical contexts in which

literature is written and read;

( knowledge of useful and precise critical terminology and, where appropriate,

linguistic and stylistic terminology;

( awareness of the range and variety of approaches to literary study, which may

include creative practice, performance, and extensive specialisation in critical and/or
linguistic theory;

( awareness of how literature and language produce and reﬂect cultural change and

difference;

( recognition of the multi-faceted nature of the discipline, and of its complex

relationship to other disciplines and forms of knowledge.

(QAA, 2000: 4–5)

Note: The Statement includes English language. The speciﬁc requirements for these
graduates are omitted from this list and from the ‘skills’ list that follows.

IGURE

4.2

Subject knowledge.

external academic review. A high score in the review gives access to
certain funds and a prominent place in the ‘tables of performance’ of
English departments that are subsequently compiled for public con-
sumption.

Knowledge

The Benchmark Statement for English identifies the knowledge grad-
uates ‘who have studied English as a significant component of their
degree’ should be able to demonstrate, as shown in Figure 4.2.

Clearly, the list in Figure 4.2 is an attempt to sketch the contours of

the curriculum in English Literature: what, broadly, should be
‘covered’ over the years of undergraduate study. So, how do you
measure up? Does your department’s curriculum include all the
subject knowledge required: a ‘substantial number of texts’ from
different periods (some of them pre-1800) and a range of genres,

Planning for teaching: curriculum and course design

101

including ‘the range’ of literatures in English, all adequately contex-
tualised (in language, culture and social history), and theorised, and
related to other disciplines? What about critical traditions and literary
history, cultural change and difference, performance, imagination in
literary creation? Perhaps it does indeed encompass all or most of
these things.

What immediately strikes us about these specifications, however, is

their vagueness (even though the compilers have prepared us for the
fact that this is not to be a ‘detailed’ curriculum). Nothing at all is said
here about the contents of the curriculum – which authors and texts
‘from different periods’ (which periods?) might be taught/studied and
when. The contested question of the canon is completely sidestepped.
Likewise, the list does not suggest any particular approach to the
teaching of literary theory and criticism, nor express a view on the
extent to which they should be taught, even though this aspect of the
curriculum is widely known to be problematic. Rather, this kind of
study is framed within tradition and history (‘the role of critical
traditions in shaping literary history’), and as one possible ‘specialist’
approach to literary study along with ‘creative practice’ and ‘perform-
ance’. Leaving aside the facts that, as we have seen, most UK literature
departments do not frame theoretical study in this way and do not
make study of it ‘specialist’ but compulsory, it looks as if all these
questions of purpose and value are to be matters for individual
institutions and their teaching staffs to determine and express through
their course syllabuses.

Such a degree of generality has no doubt made the Subject

Knowledge list, indeed the whole benchmarking enterprise, more
acceptable to the community of literature teachers in the UK – teachers
who are always characterised as ‘diverse in their approaches to study’.
In the Subject Overview Report – English (QAA, 1995), external re-
viewers (assessors) of some 72 per cent of English departments in
England and Northern Ireland summed up as follows:

Different emphases can be given to knowledge of literature . . . very
different approaches to the English curriculum . . . [ranging from] the
teaching of established canons of literature to an emphasis on exploring
the relationship of texts and contemporary social issues . . . The variety
encountered extends to related subjects such as film, drama, creative
writing . . . the literatures of other English-speaking countries and
cultural studies.

Teaching & Learning English Literature

102

All well and good no doubt. But how is this diverse body of teachers
to ensure that their graduates demonstrate sufficient ‘awareness . . .’,
‘appreciation . . .’, ‘experience . . .’ and so on, when what the Statement
offers is in effect a list of topic headings – and headings, moreover, that
have no criteria attached to them? What, after all, is to count as
sufficient awareness, etc.? Indeed, one wonders quite how the external
reviewers of English provision can make their judgements and
assessments on the basis of the subject knowledge requirements listed
here, and the next (skills) list, without their own perceptions of
purpose and value entering into the equation.

Normal provision

Despite the diversity in approach that characterises the discipline, the
English Subject Centre survey of 2002 provides a snapshot of ‘normal’
provision in the UK, shedding light on actual curriculum values and
practices in English departments.

First, it transpires that the considerations which guide the design of

the undergraduate curriculum ‘to a large extent’ are (in descending
order):

Coverage of literary periods

Reading/interpretive skills

Specialist interests of staff

Giving student choice

Coverage of literary history

Genre study

Theoretical issues.

(Halcrow Group et al., 2003: 55)

Perhaps the only surprise here is that ‘Theoretical issues’ comes so far
down the list when, as we saw in Chapter 3, elsewhere in the report
theoretical-critical courses and teaching emerge as far more significant.
Indeed, this kind of course is the only exception to the rule that in
literature departments ‘the number of optional courses [on offer] is
greater than the number of compulsory courses’ (p. 70). Rather a puzzle.
Are we perhaps to understand that, while teachers regard it as essential
for their students to study literary theory, they do not accord it the same
great prominence as a guide in their own planning of the curriculum?

The survey also explored in some depth the kinds of course that

departments designate compulsory and those that are optional or

Planning for teaching: curriculum and course design

103

Courses most commonly offered as:

(a) Compulsory

(b) Optional/elective

1. Critical/Literary theory

1. Late 20th century and contemporary

2. Shakespeare

2. Modernist

3. Renaissance

4. Medieval

4. Medieval/Victorian/Shakespeare

5. Victorian

5. Women’s writing

6. Modernist

6. Mid-20th century/Shakespeare/Romantic/

18th century/20th century American/Film/
Creative writing

Adapted from Halcrow Group et al., 2003: 56.

IGURE

4.3

UK English Subject Centre survey, 2002.

elective – and, of the (majority) optional courses, which are most
popular with students as judged by enrolment numbers. The summary
chart in Figure 4.3 shows the courses most frequently found in each
category.

Clearly, the courses most commonly provided in UK literature

departments are (still) period- and style-based, with Shakespeare as
the only single-author course identified (though no doubt the tradi-
tional canon is well represented within many of the courses). How-
ever, note that ‘Critical/Literary theory’ is confirmed as the most
commonly designated compulsory course, and that Women’s writing
features strongly among optional course provision along with prob-
ably even more recent extensions to the curriculum such as creative
writing and film.

The most popular of the optional courses (among those deemed

‘very popular’) are as follows:

1. Late 20th century and contemporary
2. Shakespeare/Women’s writing
3. Modernist/20th century American

Teaching & Learning English Literature

104

4. Victorian/Creative writing
5. Film
6. Mid-20th century/Colonial and Postcolonial.

What is immediately striking about this list (p. 57 of the report) is the
popularity among students of the newest kinds of course. In addition
to those referred to above, colonial and postcolonial literature is not
very commonly provided but, where it is, is highly valued. It is also
striking that no literature before about the 1830s is represented, with
the exception of Shakespeare (still hanging in there). Obviously,
students prefer recent and contemporary literature, American as well
as British, and Women’s writing, over all the other courses offered of
whatever type. These findings would seem to support our earlier
conclusions about the wider social forces impacting upon students’
reading habits and, especially, their desire for study that is meaning-
fully relevant to their lives.

The curriculum as represented here appears to be a compromise

between those aspects of study that literature academics regard as
essential (coverage of literary periods/history, theory and criticism)
and the newer fields that their fee-paying and increasingly mobile
students want to study. We do not mean to suggest that academics are
being dragged along by their students kicking and screaming – many
will have a primary interest in the newer fields – but it certainly seems
that (as we remarked at the start of the book) the constitution of the
discipline is changing as boundaries between it and adjacent fields
weaken. Although an earlier prediction that Literature would be
subsumed by Cultural Studies (e.g. Easthope, 1991) does not seem to
be coming to pass, there is compelling evidence here of a discipline in
the process of (if not revolution) marked, and mainly demand-led,
change. At the moment, though, the curriculum seems genuinely a
compromise: as we have seen, academics are not budging on the issue
of the importance of theoretical-critical study even though it is not
popular with students.

Skills

Further, the Subject Benchmark document identifies the subject-
specific skills that ‘are intended to provide a broad framework for
articulating the outcomes of individual programmes’ (emphasis added),
a ‘range of complementary literary, linguistic and critical skills’ (see

Planning for teaching: curriculum and course design

105

( critical skills in the close reading and analysis of texts;

( ability to articulate knowledge and understanding of texts, concepts and theories

relating to English studies;

( sensitivity to generic conventions and to the shaping effects upon communication

of circumstances, authorship, textual production and intended audience;

( responsiveness to the central role of language in the creation of meaning and

sensitivity to the affective power of language;

( rhetorical skills of effective communication and argument, both oral and written;

( command of a broad range of vocabulary and an appropriate critical terminology;

( bibliographic skills appropriate to the discipline, including accurate citation of

sources and consistent use of conventions in the presentation of scholarly work;

( awareness of how different social and cultural contexts affect the nature of

language and meaning;

( understanding of how cultural norms and assumptions inﬂuence questions of

judgement;

( comprehension of the complex nature of literary languages, and an awareness of

the relevant research by which they may be better understood.

(QAA, 2000: 5)

IGURE

4.4

Key subject-speciﬁc skills.

Figure 4.4). Notice that while this list emphasises the importance of
language to students of literature, no mention is made here or
elsewhere in the document of the intellectual and ethical kinds of
understanding and reasoning we referred to earlier – open-minded-
ness, intellectual flexibility, tolerance, love of learning, and so on –
which should surely find some place in the characterisation of an
education in Literature?

External reviewers of literature courses would again regard these

‘learning outcomes’ as demonstrable and would expect to see them
assessed in some way. But this list is perhaps a rather different matter
for the community, since most teachers of literature are not accus-
tomed to think of themselves as teaching skills per se.

Exceptions to

this include writing and presentation skills, which were reported as
Year 1 compulsory elements in 70 per cent of the UK English
departments surveyed in 2002 and in most cases were taught by the
English department itself (Halcrow Group et al., 2003: 44). Interesting-
ly, the report also records that the departments surveyed were least
satisfied with the level of knowledge their graduate students had
acquired in presentational and writing skills, in ‘confidence to effect
change’, in creativity/originality and in research and communication

Teaching & Learning English Literature

106

skills, in that order (p. 76). And we notice, in passing, that the list of
skills in this survey is considerably broader than that presented in the
benchmark document.

Nonetheless, as we look down the benchmark list (and leaving aside

the rather odd definition of sensitivity, awareness, understanding and
comprehension as ‘skills’) it is clear that the actual skills identified are
indeed subject-specific, part and parcel of studying Literature. That is,
they concern ‘knowing how to’ do the things involved in the
discipline; they are its genuine practices. But, while your courses no
doubt provide opportunities for students to exercise these skills, do
you deliberately aim to develop them progressively over the years of
undergraduate study – that is, do you attend to another of the QAA’s
requirements, for ‘progression’? And could you demonstrate this?
We’ll look at a few real courses to see how some of these things might
be accomplished in practice.

OURSE DESIGN ISSUES

Appendix 3 on the book’s website presents descriptive outlines of
three modules of the English Literature curriculum at a UK university,
one at each of Levels (Years) 1–3. They are offered as a stimulus to
reflection on your own and your department’s practice of course
design and, in particular, of constructing syllabuses. At the end of the
chapter the issues involved are summarised in the form of questions,
designed to help you analyse an existing course or think about a
course you may be setting out to design or redesign.

Three case studies

Studying literature: 1901–1945

Appendix 3(a) presents the outline of a period-based module – as we
have seen, a staple of literary studies – for students in the second half
of their first year at university. Looking at the first three sections, and
the last (brief Conclusion), we can see that these are designed to
inform the students about the aims and objectives of the module and
its contents or syllabus. The opening sentence of the Introduction
clearly sets the module in the context of degree-level studies: with
respect to progression, as one in a series of courses the students will
study. Further, the next two sentences look back to the course studied

Planning for teaching: curriculum and course design

107

in Semester 1, explain how this module builds on it and so help the
students identify the progress they are making.

The module’s objectives are expressed in broad terms of what the

students are expected to achieve – by implication, beyond what they
have achieved before (‘increase . . .’, ‘further practise . . .’, ‘extend . . .’).
Specifically, they are encouraged to:

increase your ability to read carefully and critically;

further practise your responses to literature, orally and in writing;

extend your confidence in engaging with a text;

advance your competence as researchers;

further your understanding of relationships between an age and the
literature it produces;

through study of novels, short stories and poetry, address a range of
generic as well as subject-based issues.

The final section of the document expresses some of the teachers’
values: that it is the students’ responsibility to work hard to achieve
these things, and the hope that they will be interested and stimulated by
the course.

The students also discover how they may achieve these objectives: by

participating in seminars (where they will ‘express their views’
sincerely and ‘listen to the views of others’; while they will work
independently to prepare for seminars, during them they will also
work together in small groups); by completing work such as an oral
presentation (which will also help to ‘clarify and structure [their]
thoughts’); by means of a written (in fact, word-processed) essay, in
which appropriate referencing of source material is required; and in an
unseen end-of-course examination. There will also be a series of
lectures, the details of which are not presented in the document except
to say that the first lecture will inform the students about making oral
presentations. Finally, the students are assured that their teacher is very
willing to offer help and advice, and they are told when and where she
or he will be available to them. They must consult their teacher about
the subject and progress of their oral presentation in advance: apart
from ensuring a safety net, this indicates that the students have some
choice in the matter of what they focus attention on.

In the Course Texts and Seminars sections of the document we

discover the ‘stuff’ of the module: the course syllabus and the way it
is structured. The seminar timetable shows exactly what will need to

Teaching & Learning English Literature

108

be read and considered by when – and, indeed, the promised generic
variety seems represented here in a syllabus that looks likely to
promote the students’ ‘understanding of relationships between an age
and the literature it produces’.

Literature 1830–1901: the Victorians

This module, outlined in Appendix 3(b), is similarly a popular period
course, this time for students in the first semester of their second year
– i.e. this is a module they might study immediately after the one we
have just been examining. So what we may expect to find here is
progression from one course to the next. Indeed, it is clear at a glance
that more is expected of the second-year students. First, in this
12-week module they must study three (rather than two) novels in
depth, lengthy ones at that. And they are asked to read the poetry of
Tennyson and Browning widely: the Week 4 Introduction to Victorian
poetry ‘includes’ the poems listed but, by implication, is not restricted
to them. Also, in this course it is ‘vital’ that the students read widely
among secondary sources for the period ‘as contextual knowledge is
essential to a good understanding of the literature’. A Bibliography is
included, comprising 21 ‘general books’ and 53 titles related to the
novelists and poets featured in the course, along with journals and
electronic resources. The students are exhorted to ‘Be selective and
discriminating and don’t let critics swamp your views’. Also, they are
expected to bring outcomes of their study to seminars (‘a page of
notes’) and to produce a ‘500-word commentary’, a rationale, to
accompany the oral presentation.

Although some advice is given regarding these activities, the

assumption seems to be that the students have now acquired the
necessary skills to accomplish them to some sufficient degree. It is also
interesting to note that there is no Introduction to this module outline
in which the objectives of the course are communicated (though, as
before, we are able to glean a few from the document as a whole). We
may assume that, by this stage, the teachers expect their students to
have ‘internalised’ such matters as what the point of studying
literature is and what they are setting out to achieve.

Utopias and dystopias: science fiction

Likewise, in the third course description in Appendix 3(c) there is no
explicit discussion of course objectives. And again, we see evidence of

Planning for teaching: curriculum and course design

109

(further) progression. This is a Level 3 ‘Elective’ course, which in
itself suggests the opportunity to exercise much more choice than
before (although in this and many UK universities such opportunities
are available in Year 2 if not from the start). It is also unlike the other
courses we have looked at in that it is a genre-based module, in
which the focus is on particular themes (‘fictional engagement with
time and space, imagination and fantasy’). And it appears to be more
challenging intellectually, in that it attends to ‘context’ in a much
broader sense (‘historical, political, sexual and spiritual’) – and not
just because the Introduction refers explicitly to ‘the critical chal-
lenge’. This time, study is based on five set books, but it is clear that
much wider reading of both primary and secondary texts is expected.
A General Reading list (17 titles) and Specific Titles (24) here precede
the Course Outline, and, rather than classes based on study of each
set text in turn, the weekly topics are a lot broader in scope. They
must be prepared as topics for discussion (e.g. Week 2: ‘Utopia:
Narrative Form/Structure’; Week 10: ‘Ideas of Humanity in SF/
Fantasy Texts’). And there is much more emphasis in this document
on getting out into libraries and exploring journals to research the
course themes: ‘It is thus essential . . . that you research topics
indicated in the programme in a library’; ‘. . . do you own investiga-
tion . . .’; ‘So research: use indexes and bibliographies’.

QAA requirements

Looking back to the Benchmark Statement lists, it is of course not
possible to judge how well the English ‘Subject Knowledge’ require-
ments are met in this university on the basis of only three of its
courses. But you will see that many if not most of the ‘Key
subject-specific skills’ listed are (explicitly or, often, implicitly) taught.
However, demonstrating that this is the case – to the QAA’s
satisfaction, for the benefit of the students – would almost certainly
require more explicit and detailed explanation in the documents,
especially as regards the objectives of the modules at Levels 2 and 3
and ‘progression’ from one course/level to the next. The QAA’s
Subject Overview Report – English (QAA, 1995: Summary) says as much
– and, indeed, much more. Having noted that ‘overall aims, and more
specifically the learning objectives of specific course components, were
not fully rationalised or articulated for the benefit of students’, in
paragraphs 16 and 17 of Figure 4.5 we see that clarity regarding

Teaching & Learning English Literature

110

15.

Excellence in teaching and learning was characterised by: careful planning and

formulation of well-defined objectives . . .; the clear exposition of new material;
an innovative selection of challenging texts or data, in many cases drawing on
up-to-date scholarly material or the teacher’s own research; well-focused elicitation,
based on careful listening; students displaying conﬁdence and self-expression, often
associated with a critique of the product of self-directed work; the fostering of
genuinely open debate about the nature of the subject and current debates within it;
and the setting of well-judged recommendations for further reading or follow-up
assignments. Flair, enthusiasm and the lecturers’ ability to inspire students also
featured strongly.

16.

. . . Other features of excellence include the links between the particular class

and the curriculum as a whole . . . also . . . the students’ quality of experience in
undertaking studies with a high degree of independence, supported by excellent
tutorial guidance and well-designed course material.

17.

. . . The main recurring need was to articulate more clearly to students the

particular part the class played in meeting the course objectives.

18.

Other aspects in observed classes judged to require improvement included a lack

of rigour and intellectual challenge, an absence of overall structure or a failure to
clarify key points of learning, or a tendency for some students to lose interest.

(QAA, 1995. Available at: www.qaa.ac.uk – accessed 12 March 2004. Emphases added.)

IGURE

4.5

Subject Overview Report – English: Summary . . .

objectives (or, ‘learning outcomes’) is also required at the level of the
individual class. Although in our anonymous university these and
other matters will probably have been discussed with students during
teaching sessions, the text in Figure 4.5 shows that this is not enough.

Similar issues are highlighted in the concluding section of the report:

‘Many providers need to articulate more clearly for the benefit of
students the relationship between subject aims, methods of learning,
criteria and methods of assessment, and intended learning objectives.’
Since the mid-1990s, when the report was compiled, specification of
‘learning outcomes’ that students must demonstrate has replaced all
talk of ‘intended learning objectives’. And, as we saw in Chapter 2,
reference to ‘learning’ (as opposed to ‘teaching’) is now ubiquitous.
Nevertheless, what the report draws teachers’ attention to is the need
to achieve congruence between curriculum aims and the objectives
and design of individual courses – a matter to which we will return.

Planning for teaching: curriculum and course design

111

‘Other’ skills

Meanwhile, this is not the end of the story. In UK higher education,
students of all subjects must also acquire general (often, confusingly
for us, dubbed ‘generic’) skills, such as those of information technol-
ogy, teamwork and time management. The complete list of ‘Generic
and graduate skills’ is presented in Appendix 5 on the book’s website.
You will see that all but three (possibly four) of the points are in fact
expressly taught in and through the discipline. The genuinely ‘other’
skills are: the third point, ‘employability’; the last two, ‘IT skills’ and
‘time-management and organisational skills’; and the ninth, ‘team
work’ (although that is more debatable). These skills, we argued
earlier, are different in kind and properly may be taught only as
students pursue their study of Literature.

IT skills

Of these other skills, we saw that IT skills are indeed addressed in the
sample course outlines, in the requirements for students to use
CD-ROMs and to access databases and websites on the Internet for
research purposes and to word-process their essays. In common with
other UK universities, this one has a Media Centre (or some such)
where students may use equipment of various kinds, always including
a bank of computers, and where they can seek technical help from
members of staff dedicated to running it. Library staff (here located in
Learning Resources) are available to offer their help too. However, in
the English Subject Overview Report (QAA, 1995) acquisition of IT
skills is described as ‘an area in need of development’ in many
universities. In 2002 the English Subject Centre discovered that 70 per
cent of the English departments surveyed regarded their use of IT in
teaching as ‘underdeveloped’ or ‘early stages’ – although by 2005 the
great majority hoped to see it ‘well established’ (49 per cent) or
‘innovative’ (25 per cent) (Halcrow Group et al., 2003: 26).

Teamwork

Teamwork also has its place in these (and most) literature courses, as
students work in twos and threes to plan and deliver oral presenta-
tions and engage in small-group work during seminars. Although
teamwork of these kinds does not strictly speaking flow from
consideration of the overarching aims of the English curriculum,
discussion of ideas among peers certainly does – and from early on in

Teaching & Learning English Literature

112

the discipline’s history UK university departments have practised (at
least) whole-group seminar discussion. As we shall see in the next
chapter, small-group work has been gaining significant ground in the
last decade or so and mainly for reasons intrinsic to the discipline.

Time-management and organisational skills

Acquisition of these skills is a similar case in point – they are things
students have always had to grapple with when trying to meet the
demands of the syllabus: making choices among a wealth of primary
and secondary reading, organising themselves to deliver the required
work, making time for writing essays, preparing for seminars, and so
forth. They are, rightly, things that students learn to do as they study
literature courses. But it is only quite recently (and patchily) that these
skills have been identified as such, and presented to students as
important because they are ‘marketable’ aspects of their higher
education.

The capacity to adapt and transfer the critical methods of the
discipline to a variety of working environments

The last of the skills, this is probably the most contentious within a
mainly cognitive discipline such as Literature. Some academics regard
it as well beyond their remit and/or their ability to offer. Indeed,
patchy provision is highlighted in the Subject Overview Report (QAA,
1995: Conclusions):

m. Whilst almost all English providers include preparation for employ-

ment in their aims and objectives, in practice such aims are seldom
articulated in the form of specific learning objectives, and their value
is frequently understated . . .

We might ourselves be tempted to conclude that ‘almost all . . .
providers include preparation for employment in their aims and
objectives’ largely because the QAA requires it (but see Yorke
and Knight, 2004). Nevertheless, the report confirms that ‘employers
. . . valued highly the skills acquired by students’ (

'38), and we

may take it that the skills they are thought to value most are
those listed in Appendix 5. Or, alternatively, we may prefer to
attend to the Dearing Report’s conclusion that ‘The single most
important capacity employers seek in those with higher education

Planning for teaching: curriculum and course design

113

qualifications is intellectual capabilities of a high order’ (National
Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education, 1997).

ROGRESSION

As we have seen, the QAA also requires and assesses evidence of
progression over the years of undergraduate study (and of differen-
tiation between levels of study). However, in the Benchmark Statement
there is little or no discussion of what precisely is meant by this. What
we gleaned from the reviewers’ Subject Overview Report is that
teachers must make the relationships between their courses plain and
clear to students. We are also given to understand that the ultimate goal
of progression is ‘independent study’, and that achieving it is enhanced
by ‘. . . better tutorial support in the first stages, special attention to the
identified needs of non-standard entrants and mature students, and
increasing, controlled, progression to independent study’ (

'22).

Choice

In the three sample modules, we saw that students’ progression is
addressed to some extent and that one measure of it is the increased
choice the students are offered over the years of undergraduate study,
as regards both what they study and how. Offering such choice is
common practice in UK English departments; according to the QAA
reviewers, in 1994–5 ‘approximately 80 per cent of the providers offer
a degree of flexibility and choice to their students, either by using
unitised or modular structures, or by designing courses with optional
studies’. There is every reason to suppose that the proportion is now
if anything greater – the 2002 English Subject Centre survey lists 45
different optional courses (Halcrow Group et al., 2003: 70). In that
same survey we have seen that ‘Giving student choice’ was fourth in
the list of guiding considerations in course planning among the
respondents (p. 55). And in the three sample modules we saw that,
over time, students are required to make increasingly independent
judgements about their reading. But is this all that can be said on the
subject of progression, let alone the measures of it?

‘Spiral’ curriculum

In this connection, an educationalist we might turn to for some
inspiration is Jerome Bruner, who in the 1960s first conceived of the

Teaching & Learning English Literature

114

curriculum as a ‘spiral’. More recently, he characterised ‘the idea’ as
follows:

. . . that in teaching a subject you begin with an ‘intuitive’ account that
is well within the reach of a student, and then circle back later to a more
formal or highly structured account, until, with however many more
recyclings are necessary, the learner has mastered the topic or subject in
its full generative power.

He continues:

. . . ‘Readiness is not only born but made.’ The general proposition rests
on the still deeper truth that any domain of knowledge can be constructed
at varying levels of abstractness or complexity. That is to say, domains
of knowledge are made, not found: they can be constructed simply or
complexly, abstractly or concretely. And it can easily be demonstrated
within certain interesting limits that a so-called ‘higher level’ way of
characterizing a domain of knowledge encompasses, replaces, and renders
more powerful and precise a ‘lower-level’ characterization.

(Bruner, 1996a: 119)

Perhaps we can think more productively about progression in these
cognitive terms, which give some content to the notion of independent
study as the ultimate goal of a university education.

That is, the aim

is to enable students to think in the ‘higher level’ – abstract, complex
and generative – manner Bruner describes. It maybe seems obvious
that achieving this depends on first introducing ideas in an intuitive,
concrete, simpler manner and then quite deliberately revisiting these
same ideas at some later stage(s) ‘in a more formal or highly structured
account’; such progression would clearly need careful planning, quite
possibly over a number of levels/years of study. But, as we shall see
in Chapter 5, obvious though this ‘idea’ of Bruner’s may seem, it is
powerful and far-reaching. And, maybe, the ultimate aim is really
meta-cognition? – not just ‘mastering the topic’ or the doing of things
but, in the process, knowing what one is doing and why.

Specialisation vs multidisciplinarity

Course design is not only affected by the level of the course in question
but also by the degree of specialisation in the subject offered to or
chosen by students. In 1995 the subject assessors found that:

Planning for teaching: curriculum and course design

115

Approximately half the institutions visited provide English in some form
of modular structure . . . The most extreme form . . ., where students
have an entirely free choice in devising their programme after the first
year, is only operated in about 10 per cent of the visited providers. Where
this is the case, the assessors often raised questions about coherence and
progression in the curriculum as well as the quality of the processes for
students to make informed choices. The normal pattern is some form of
core or prescribed structure, with a varying number of options.

(QAA, 1995)

In 2000 the conclusions of the English benchmark Statement were
similar; around half of the (then c. 40,000) students studying Literature
at university were doing so in specialist single honours degree
programmes, the other half as part of combined or joint honours
degrees, or as ‘a central subject in . . . modular schemes in the
Humanities’. The document continues:

Combined and Joint Honours students are rarely taught or assessed
separately from their peers in Single Honours at the level of course or
module. This benchmarking statement therefore applies to all students
taking a significant proportion of English courses as part of their degree
programme.

(QAA, 2000: 3)

Presumably, the students who are not in the single honours pro-
gramme simply study fewer of the Literature courses the university
offers. Students in a combined honours programme, for example, can
expect to spend around half the time studying English as specialists in
the subject – and those in joint and modular programmes, a smaller
proportion still. So, thinking back to the QAA’s lists of ‘Subject
knowledge’ and ‘Key subject-specific skills’ requirements (and without
knowing quite what is meant in the Statement by taking ‘a significant
proportion’ of English courses), these students surely cannot be
expected to acquire the same breadth or depth of knowledge and
understanding as their specialist peers. And is it really the case that
they will be acquiring knowledge, understanding and skill that is
similar, if not the same, in kind? Are we comparing like with like here?

Multidisciplinarity

Usually, the strength of specialised study is that it allows sustained,
systematic attention to be given to a class of objects (in the case of

Teaching & Learning English Literature

116

Literature, mainly texts) and to progressive mastery of the associated
interrelated concepts, patterns of reasoning and expression over time.
Those who study a combined/joint honours or modular programme,
in which courses in Literature are mixed with those in another or other
subjects, must of course divide their attention between those subjects
– inevitably, their education in Literature is less sustained and less
systematic.

On the other hand, we know that development of knowledge and

understanding in one discipline may be impossible or hampered
without elements of knowledge and understanding in another: this is
perhaps true of Literature and History. (In the UK, the English Subject
Centre survey (Halcrow Group et al., 2003: 53) reports that almost 80
per cent of Literature departments offer opportunities for ‘interdisci-
plinary [?] study’ and that the combination most often chosen by
students is Literature with History, followed by media/film/television
studies.) But, even so, History (like Literature) retains its validity and
unique character as a discipline. This suggests that we can properly
understand the interrelationship between the two disciplines only if
we first recognise the basic differences between them. Then we may
go on to see in what respects they may be related. The main problem
for students in multidisciplinary programmes is how to develop an
adequate grasp of elements within two (or more) quite different types
of experience and knowledge without sustained, systematic attention
to them individually.

And these programmes present difficulties for teachers too. Either

they must strive, in interdisciplinary fashion, to integrate their
knowledge of different subjects; or they must learn to work collab-
oratively with colleagues from other disciplinary traditions – not
alongside, but with them, otherwise students will face the further
problem of studying a programme that is at best fragmentary and, at
worst, unintelligible. Those of us who teach in combined, joint or
modular degree programmes, then, face the extra challenge of design-
ing courses that pay sufficient attention to disciplinary integrity and
difference within a multidisciplinary framework that is coherent and
offers progression. Leaving aside the question of what ‘sufficient
attention’ might be, even if we were to achieve all this spectacularly
well – design perfectly balanced multidisciplinary programmes – the
question remains: should we apply the same criteria of judgement to
these students’ achievements as we apply to the single-honours
(specialist) student of the disciplines concerned?

Planning for teaching: curriculum and course design

117

This is not at all to suggest that for these students our standards

should be lower; rather it raises the question: are these students’
knowledge, understanding and skills different from the specialist
students’? If, like us, you are inclined to answer ‘yes’ – with no
implication of inferiority or superiority – then, simply, there can be no
justification for treating all the students as if they were the same. As
we saw, the English Benchmark Statement does just that (except to say
that non-specialist students are not required to study writing pre-
1800); and, in doing so, it offers no guidance to the many teachers who
must grapple with such difficult issues. It might be helpful to indicate
which among the many requirements in the lists may be expected to
apply, or apply to whatever extent, to students who spend, say, 50–60
per cent and 30–40 per cent of their time studying Literature. (If you
teach such students, perhaps have a go at it yourself?) Other
implications of this question, to do with student assessment, are
discussed in Chapter 6.

ODELS OF CURRICULUM DESIGN REVISITED

We saw earlier that a major thrust of the Subject Overview Report for
English (QAA, 1995) is to draw attention to the need for congruence
between curriculum/programme aims and the objectives and design
of individual courses of study. That is, a need for planning conceived
as a coherent process is emphasised, in which the various parts
(courses: their objectives and contents, and teaching-learning and
assessment methods) are brought into what might be termed ‘con-
structive alignment’ with the overarching aims of the discipline and
programme. What we are concerned with here, then, is relational
patterns.

A process-oriented curriculum model

As we saw, when designing courses our jumping-off point is cognitive
– the discipline is our central concern. Practically speaking, we start
with subject-curriculum aims which are designed to express our
purposes and our values as educators, from which we derive more
specific teaching/learning objectives and begin to delineate a number
of courses, at different levels, that will offer opportunities for our
particular students progressively to acquire the desired knowledge,

Teaching & Learning English Literature

118

understanding, experience, abilities and values – toggling back and
forth between overarching curriculum aims and the details of the
developing courses as we proceed – and in the process taking account
of the requirements of the other interested parties.

We conclude, then, that an iterative process such as this, of alignment

between curriculum aims and (the various components of) courses,
perhaps captures the sense of dynamic relationships – of a process that
is creative and participatory – rather better than the more linear and
mechanistic procedure implied in the ‘rational’ curriculum develop-
ment model. We would say, too, that in this more creative conception
of the process the central role of teachers – as experts in the discipline
and professional educators – is fully acknowledged, not only as
regards their role in determining educational aims, objectives and
syllabuses but also the other aspects of course design we have yet to
explore: appropriate methods of teaching, of student assessment and
of evaluation.

Activity?

If you are setting out to design or redesign a course/module or would like to
analyse the structure of an existing course, bear in mind these interconnected
questions:

( The discipline is your starting point: what overarching curriculum/programme

aims shape this course?

( What are the objectives (or, if you prefer, learning outcomes) of the course, in

terms of what [knowledge/understandings/abilities/values/skills . . .]?

( What type of course is it [e.g. period, genre, theme based . . .]?

( what is its ‘value’ and status [length/credits awarded . . .; ﬁrst, second level, etc.;

compulsory/optional . . .]?

( Who is the course for [specialist literature students/combined or joint honours/

multidisciplinary]? How would you characterise the ‘student body’?

( This is just one of a number of literature courses students must ‘progress’

through: where does it ‘ﬁt’ in your department’s offerings [curriculum aims
expressed/level/type/status], and what is its relationship to (central
concepts/practices in) courses students may study before and after? How does it
differ from courses offered at other levels?

( Which texts make up the syllabus and how is the course structured? Are the

students offered choice in the matter of what they study?

( How does the course meet any ‘external’ requirements that apply, from

government and its agencies and from the wider university?

Planning for teaching: curriculum and course design

119

OSTSCRIPT

Finally, we should briefly make our own position as clear as we can.
We have been concerned to argue here for a view of higher education
curriculum design that locates the subject to be taught and studied at
the centre – which, we further argue, entails a central role in course
design for the expert teacher. We have argued this case by proceeding
from the broad question examined in Chapters 1 and 2, ‘what is a
higher education in Literature?’, and in this chapter from discussion
of students’ needs. However, we are aware that the idea of ‘negotiat-
ing’ the curriculum with students is currently in favour among
educationalists. Some go further, promoting a ‘learner-centredness’
that seems to deny teaching and the teacher much of a role at all. In
that context, we would emphasise that our argument has not been an
attempt to promote a teacher- (rather than student-) centred ideology.
These must be matters of genuine, reasoned debate, not genuflection.
As we remark in Chapter 1, it is perfectly legitimate, indeed desirable,
that students have purposes and objectives of their own in choosing a
higher education in any subject.

And on the question of students’

choice regarding what is studied, we have suggested in a number of
places in this chapter that the exercise of such choice is desirable on
educational grounds. The question of students’ needs is raised again
and the notion of student-centredness addressed directly in the next
chapter, where we believe these matters more clearly (or at least, less
controversially) belong.

Notes

1. Maybe too reasonable in view of the extent of tacit or ‘hidden’ knowledge that

teachers need to bring to the surface in the process of design and make explicit
to students in course descriptions and in their teaching – the many assumptions
that lie ‘behind’ the course requirements: see the classic text, The Hidden
Curriculum, Snyder (1971).

2. This is not an innocent question. ‘Delivering’ the curriculum is currently the

fashionable term in some parts of the world, but it is misleading. However the
curriculum is delivered (whether by text, TV, computer, a person in a
classroom), it is mainly teachers who shape it: who make the necessary prior
cognitive and value judgements about what is to be taught/learned. Students
may well have a role to play, but, it will be argued, these matters cannot be
mainly their responsibility. And we must surely question the metaphor of
delivering knowledge to students, as if it is an object they can ‘possess’. The
metaphor is reductive in that it begs the whole question of the students’
learning, of what it means ‘to learn’.

Teaching & Learning English Literature

120

3. However, a focus on methodology – on how texts are taught and studied, rather

than on what is taught and studied – is not new (e.g. Scholes, 1985). And
recently, in the context of lack of consensus regarding the purposes of literary
study, a ‘reshaping of literary identity’ by foregrounding pedagogy is proposed:
that is, a new focus on ‘the context and the means through which knowledge
is produced’ (McCurrie, 2004: 44).

4. Vygotsky’s notion of ‘scaffolding’ is analogous and relevant here. As we saw in

Chapter 2, the idea is that students need guidance and support in the early
stages of their development if they are to become more expert and autonomous.
As they proceed along the path of development, less and less support is needed
or should be offered by the teacher – whether in the face-to-face or online
setting. This may apply to the design of study tasks (from the teacher spelling
out what needs to be done to students themselves identifying the ‘problem’ and
possible solutions); to acquiring resources (from the teacher making appropriate
resources available to the students identifying what they need and finding it);
and to social support (from the teacher closely supervising group work to
students working together independently or, as individuals, undertaking
research-based study).

5. An argument about this might also derive from consideration of what we mean

by ‘higher education’. Or it might be based on the notion of ‘adulthood’ and its
implications for higher education – see, for instance, Paterson (1979) for a
thoroughgoing examination of the issues. The age of majority in the UK is 18
years, so almost all students in higher education are deemed adult.

Key references

Brookfield, S. D. (1986) Understanding and Facilitating Adult Learning. Buckingham:

Open University Press, Chapter 9.

Bruner, J. (1996) The Culture of Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press.

Eisner, E. W. (1976) ‘Educational connoisseurship and criticism: their form and

functions in educational evaluation’, Journal of Aesthetic Education, 10(3–4):
135–50.

Websites

QAA (1995) QO 12/95 Subject Overview Report – English. Higher Education Funding

Council for England, Quality Assessment of English 1994–95. Available at:
http://www.qaa.ac.uk/revreps/subjrev/All/qo–12–95.htm

QAA (2000) Subject Benchmark Statement – English. Gloucester: Quality Assurance

Agency for Higher Education. Available at: www.qaa.ac.uk

Planning for teaching: curriculum and course design

121

Methods of teaching

‘G

OOD TEACHING

’

REVISITED

In Chapter 4 we explored aspects of a planning cycle for teaching,
addressing the questions ‘what should I be teaching, and why?’ By the
end of the discussion, the notion of a ‘rational’ model of curriculum
and course design had been replaced by a more dynamic – creative
and participatory – understanding of how courses in Literature might
be developed: an iterative process of alignment between subject/
curriculum aims, course objectives and contents that not only takes
into account the requirements of the discipline but also of students of
Literature, the university and the wider society. This chapter addresses
the question ‘how should I be teaching?’ and discusses another major
aspect of course planning: the methods and media of teaching-learning
to be used, and the study activities teachers ask their students to
engage in.

As a preliminary, we should first briefly return to the elements of

‘good teaching’ discussed in Chapter 2. There, with educational
philosophers Hirst and Peters (1970), we argued that as teachers – and
for what we do to count as ‘teaching’ at all – we must, at least, be
aiming to create conditions in which learning is possible. That is,
teachers must engage in activities with the intention of bringing about
learning and which signal what is to be learned, and teach in ways that
are intelligible to and within the capacities of the learners. And we
argued that for ‘good’ teaching we must also aim to engage and/or
extend students’ interest in and enthusiasm for the subjects of study,
and encourage them to think independently and critically about what
they study (see Figure 2.1). These conditions, then, are the jumping-off
point for our consideration of methods of teaching Literature.

Second, in asking the question ‘how should I be teaching?’ we

should always bear in mind the less formal issues touched on in

previous chapters, such as the persona the teacher adopts in class and
its impact on students’ trust in his or her skill and commitment; the
impact on students of the teacher’s pedagogic style (a preference for
lecturing, for questioning and guided discussion, open seminar or
tutorial discussion, and so on); the teacher’s abilities as a guide,
mentor and model (as opposed to a remote expert), helping to engage
students in the issues; the teacher’s skill at explanations that work for
particular student audiences, and at making reference to existential,
social and topical matters that connect course content to the world of
students’ lives. We remind you of these matters here lest in what
follows they should become swamped by the many more formal
considerations of teaching.

Educational aims and teaching methods

Calls for one kind of curriculum organisation or another are often
confused with calls for the introduction of new types of teaching and
learning activity, perhaps especially electronic forms these days. But,
really, questions about the ends and contents of the curriculum (which
we explored in Chapter 4) should be kept distinct in teachers’ minds
from questions about which teaching-learning methods they might
use, for two reasons. First, we argued in Chapter 2 that educational
aims and the contents of courses do not determine methods of teaching,
and went on to demonstrate this in the section ‘Writing pedagogy’ in
Chapter 3. In principle, no method (that is educational) is ruled out;
we have seen that the means by which teachers can engage students
in the subject matter and help make it intelligible and interesting are
many and varied.

However, second, teaching-learning methods, being educational,

themselves embody and express educational aims. They have a double
significance: means to curriculum ends and educational in their own
right. For example, adopting methods that encourage students to think
independently and critically will serve one of the literature teacher’s
main curriculum aims – to promote the kind of study in which greater
understanding of meaning and significance is the goal – while, at the
same time, being able to ‘think for oneself’ is clearly an educational
end in itself. In effect, certain teaching methods are ruled out by such
an aim. Clearly it could not be achieved by methods that disregard the
students’ critical autonomy: for example, an exclusive focus on
right/wrong answers or the use of drill. Repetitious exercises cannot

Methods of teaching

123

encourage independent, critical thinking (furthermore, drill is not of
itself educational, even if it might be justified in some circumstances
and on other grounds). And methods that are inherently ethically
objectionable would certainly be ruled out; any method that is biased
in some way, for instance, or which involves moral or emotional
pressures or a manipulative withholding of information and ideas.

So, ideally, the teaching methods we employ will be both appropri-

ate to Literature curriculum aims and educational in their own right.
The classroom discussion of ‘Araby’ in Chapter 2 is an instance of this.
Among other things, the vignette was designed to illustrate that
literary concepts are not built hierarchically; that, for example, there is
no one ‘right’ way in to the story but, rather, many possible ways in,
all of them valid (although not necessarily equally fruitful in particular
cases). In our discipline, concepts are fluid, made and remade in
relationship to other concepts and intimately bound up with beliefs
and values within social discourse. Critical thinking involves problem-
atising, not taking things at face value, and also creativity – sensing
difficulties and gaps, ‘something askew’ in understanding, imagining
alternative possibilities and making guesses (Garrison, 1991: 291). It
follows, then, that the way students learn to study literature is
fundamentally important. And this of course has profound implica-
tions for the teacher’s pedagogic practice.

Most obviously, it is both inappropriate and counterproductive to

teach texts in a manner that suggests they may be known ‘correctly’
or ‘incorrectly’, once and for all. Current external demands for
containment, quantification, efficiency and observable, measurable
outcomes of learning in all higher education – in short, performativity

– simply miss the point when applied to a discipline characterised by
abstract, complex mental discriminations and richly dynamic relation-
ships between processes of analysis, interpretation and evaluation. As
we argued in Chapter 2, the Literature teacher’s prime responsibility
is to induct students into the distinctive purposes, objects of study and
text-genres, methods of inquiry, central concepts and networks of
ideas, conventional uses of evidence and modes of written and verbal
expression that characterise the discipline – that is, the particularities
of literary-critical discourse. In Chapter 4 (under ‘Cognitive aims’),
these responsibilities were translated into overarching aims of the
teaching-learning of literature. And we argued that these aims,
concerning the acquisition of certain knowledge, abilities and values,
should be ‘framed’ by an understanding of why they are important:

Teaching & Learning English Literature

124

connected to the existential and social purposes that make them worth
acquiring.

In short, we should aim to offer our students the opportunity to

engage in literary-critical discourse as participants in a significant
socio-cultural process. On that understanding of our task, the question
before us is ‘how best can it be achieved?’

EACHING BEGINNING STUDENTS: SOCIO-CULTURAL

PEDAGOGIC PRINCIPLES

It will be helpful to begin by deriving from what has been said so far
some fundamental pedagogic principles that can act as guides to the
teacher’s thoughts and actions – especially as regards the crucial early
stages of students’ higher education. Apart from the fact that begin-
nings just are fundamental, we also have in mind the facts about our
student populations: that, in the UK for example, ‘The majority of
English programmes in almost all institutions are attracting propor-
tions of mature students in excess of 30 per cent’ – many of them
under-qualified returners-to-study – and ‘significant numbers of
international students’ (QAA, 1995). Of course it is not sufficient
simply to note such demographic change. It is vital that teachers think
through its implications for their teaching practices.

In Chapter 1, we suggested one such implication – that some shift

of emphasis and resource will need to be made (in the clear absence
of any increase in resources for teaching) from the later to the earlier
stages of higher education. We also suggested there that, crucially,
beginning students of Literature should be engaged in the processes
that are central to the discipline – reading (the discursive processes of
textual analysis-interpretation-evaluation) and communication (speak-
ing and writing appropriately) – and engaged in ways that promote
their participation as independent, critical centres of consciousness.
Also taking account of the precepts of good teaching, we suggest here
that the interconnected pedagogic principles of engagement, intelligibil-
ity and participation can offer us the right kind of guidance.

In discussing these principles we’ll take as an example a module of

the distance-taught UK Open University (UKOU) course, Living Arts,
entitled Words (Robb, 1994). The Words module is both introductory
and exemplifies these principles; because UKOU students are not
required to have any academic qualifications on enrolment in the

Methods of teaching

125

undergraduate programme their teachers have been forced to rethink
approaches to introductory teaching. We also chose this module on
grounds of convenience – unlike the ephemeral nature of what goes
on face-to-face in the classroom, in distance education teaching is often
via printed text that is published and available for public scrutiny, and
for us to examine here.

The Principle of Engagement

This principle posits that introductory courses, intended as a prelude
to years of further study, must arouse students’ interest in the study
of Literature/sustain their initial enthusiasm and aim to increase it.
Furthermore, ‘engagement’ implies a process of connecting with, or
latching onto, something that already exists (people’s knowledge,
experience, understanding, preconception, skill, desire) and harness-
ing it, ready to take off in appropriate directions. It may seem that
teachers must therefore have some reliable knowledge of their
students’ backgrounds, in particular their current knowledge and
experience of literature, their enthusiasms and their expectations of
higher education. But this poses problems, in distance education
especially, when teachers are faced with large classes or when
reaching out to new or hitherto under-represented student groups. So,
how is it possible to teach in ways that engage all our students?

In Words this is largely achieved by re-conceptualising the process

of engagement. The module begins with brief discussion of the range
of pastimes now available to people in their homes, and goes on to
show (from newspaper reports of recent surveys) that nevertheless
reading for pleasure is on the increase in the UK. This raises certain
questions:

Why it is that reading is still so popular, when the newer forms of entertainment
. . . such as television, video and computers, offer such colourful and exciting
alternatives? Why . . . should anyone choose to go to the trouble and effort of
reading a book?

The students are then asked to explore these questions through the
following ‘Activity’.

Teaching & Learning English Literature

126

Think of a TV programme that you watched and enjoyed recently – one that told
a story, such as an episode from a drama series or soap opera, or a TV ﬁlm.

Think also of a story that you’ve read, whether in a book or a magazine . . .
Spend a few minutes thinking about the main differences between the two

experiences . . . and then jot down your thoughts. You may ﬁnd it helpful to use
these questions as a guide:

1. Did you read the story/watch the programme in one go, or spread it out over a

number of occasions?

2. Where were you when you were reading/watching?
3. How much work do you feel you were made to do in each case?
4. Was the experience a private one, or one that you shared with other people?
5. Which of the two experiences was more enjoyable?

(Words: 8)

Each of the numbered questions is then taken up and discussed, and
the students are also asked to listen to part of a cassette-tape in which
a group of people discuss their experiences and judgements (all of
which of course translates readily to small- or whole-group classroom
discussion). Aspects of this discussion lead students into the next
section of the teaching text, entitled ‘Writing and imagination’, in
which they are asked to read a short story about a woman’s conflict
with her young child as she shops in a supermarket. In the process,
their study of ‘what happens when we read and how writing
‘‘works’’ ’ (p. 6) is launched.

So, this introduction to Literature does not begin with a potted

history of Eng. Lit., with discussion of the major literary genres or
literary-critical movements. Nor is it grounded in the belief that
teachers must have knowledge of individual students’ previous
experience of such things or even of their preparedness for study
generally. Rather, it starts by asking the students to reflect on what
they actually do and experience while doing – it engages the students’
attention by connecting with their thoughts, beliefs and feelings – with
the intention of bringing their ideas about the roles of imaginative
writing in the contemporary context to the forefront of their minds. It
aims to focus their minds appropriately, on the subject to be studied,
and get them thinking constructively about it from the start; thus, the
general concerns of the subject are active in their minds. In doing this,
the activities create a conceptual ‘framework for understanding’ and
the making of meaning. As Bruner (1996a: 13) avers: ‘The meaning of
any fact, proposition or encounter is relative to the . . . frame of

Methods of teaching

127

reference in terms of which it is construed’. This has particular force
when applied to propositional knowledge, the kind mainly encoun-
tered in higher education, which by its nature is decontextualised,
abstract and rule-based, and so is especially challenging for beginning
students. As teachers, all too often we assume that the context or
framework for understanding what we are setting out to teach is
already understood (Northedge, 2003: 172).

Such frameworks may be established in a variety of ways (by

presenting students with a case study or a few photographs for
analysis, for example, or with a vignette, scenario or story) but any
activities such as those just described provide starting points for study
which may be developed in what follows. They are designed to
explore the knowledge, experience and preconceptions that students
are likely to share at the outset, by virtue of their membership of a
broadly common cultural group. No matter what their personal,
gender, class, age or ethnic differences may be, all the students of
Words are inhabitants of contemporary British-European society; they
experience and are influenced by current cultural preoccupations and
forms, especially through the ubiquitous mass media, and already
participate in a wide range of ‘everyday’ discourses about them. The
teacher’s aim is to plan and conduct ‘excursions’ from these familiar
discourses into the target, specialist discourse (Northedge, 2003: 175).

In other words, these introductory strategies arise out of a socio-

cultural conception of engagement, which suggests reliable and appro-
priate jumping-off points for the teaching-learning enterprise – just as
the authors of the literary texts the students read themselves rely on
this kind of engagement with their broad audiences. An approach to
teaching such as this therefore has the same kind of validity as the
works of literature being studied; both the literary works and the
teaching materials appeal to the same notional ‘reading public’. It is
thus an approach that is intrinsically appropriate to the teaching of
Literature.

The principle of intelligibility

At the same time, this socio-cultural conception of engagement accords
with the principle of intelligibility, which assumes that if students are
actively to engage in processes of textual analysis-interpretation-
evaluation – to be active ‘makers of meaning’ – then what they are
taught must be intelligible to them from the start. Further, if the

Teaching & Learning English Literature

128

students’ everyday experiences and understandings, invoked at the
outset, are to be brought into ever closer relationship with the
concerns, processes and terms of the academic, literary-analytical
discourse to which they seek introduction, then those frameworks for
understanding must be sustained. Strands of meaning must run
through our teaching, frequently connecting with students’ everyday
experience and concerns. In this context, UKOU teachers have found
the notion of the ‘teaching narrative’ a fruitful one. That is, introduc-
tory teaching is conducted through a series of concrete activities
contained within a developing ‘story’.

Story helps to construct conditions of intersubjectivity . . . In contrast to
the sharing of rule-based propositional meaning, which can easily break
down, stories reliably generate stable shared meaning. This makes them
excellent vehicles in teaching . . .

(Northedge, 2003: 174)

In other words, intelligibility demands that teachers show and
demonstrate rather than always explain matters propositionally.
Teachers tend first to explain a proposition or theory and then offer an
example, and students rarely understand that initial explanation.
Intelligibility demands the reverse of this procedure: teaching from
example to explanation. Definitions come last, not first, because
understanding them is a high-level ability.

The storyline of the Words module, which encompasses both subject

content and study process, is based on a few core questions put as simply
as possible near the start (indeed, meeting Hirst and Peters’ injunction
to ‘exhibit what is to be learnt’). Questions imply ‘answers’ and so
offer directional impetus to teachers when plotting the teaching
narrative.

Core questions

1. What can imaginative writing do?
2. How do ﬁction and poetry ‘work’?
3. Is there a ‘right’ way to read a novel, story or poem?
4. How do some novels, stories and poems come to be seen as better than others?

(Words: 17)

Methods of teaching

129

Each major section of the teaching text focuses on one question only
and, in turn, builds on the work done in previous sections. According-
ly, attention is focused also on connections between sections of text and
relationships between main teaching points – that is, the flow of
meaning is sustained – along the way towards some resolution of the
issues (if only provisional). Each section ends with a short ‘Section
Summary’ which provides an ‘answer’ to the question addressed
there. So, students may easily locate and refer to these summaries in
order to remind themselves how the story is developing. Within each
section, fairly frequent ‘Key Points’ boxes remind the students of the
main issues as they are developed. For example, the Key Points which
round off the opening section of Words are as follows.

Key points

Changes in technology have transformed both the range and nature of the
leisure activities available to us.

Despite this, reading is still an extremely popular activity. In fact, more people

are reading books than ever before.

Reading offers different kinds of enjoyment from watching television. While

television and ﬁlms use images and sounds to appeal to our senses, writing uses
words to appeal to the imagination.

(Words: 12)

These devices enable students to follow the meaning of the teaching
text as they go along and to access parts of it at will, and so more easily
keep in mind relationships between the parts and the whole – rather
than experiencing their study as a series of episodes or fragments, ‘one
damn thing after another’. In the introductory stages, some ‘redun-
dancy’ is entirely necessary (underscoring of main (key) points,
summaries, repetition of unfamiliar terms) within a generally discur-
sive, though direct, mode of address. Furthermore, intelligibility
demands that, to begin with, technical terms and abstractions are kept
to a minimum, introduced only gradually and always explored at the
point of introduction. In effect, ‘the teacher is able to ‘‘lend’’ students
the capacity to frame meanings they cannot yet produce independent-
ly’ (Northedge, 2003: 172) by initiating and supporting a vigorous flow
of meaning.

Comparison between the transparency of the Key Points for Section

1 of the module (above), and the relative conceptual and linguistic

Teaching & Learning English Literature

130

complexity of those for the final section, below, demonstrates how
much this pedagogic approach enables beginning students to achieve
in a short time.

Key points

One of the ways in which critical opinion can inﬂuence the status of a text is by
classifying it, for example as either ‘popular’ or ‘serious’.

The public reputation or status of a text can inﬂuence our private judgements

about it.

The reputation of a text can change over time, as changing ideas and tastes

make it possible to reappraise its status.

(Words: 99)

The principle of participation

The principles of engagement and intelligibility both encourage the
students’ participation. But, in particular, it is promoted through the
series of Activities referred to earlier, which drives the teaching
narrative and is designed to keep students actively engaged in their
studies. In the first few sections of the Words module, for example,
Activities take the form of the one cited above – a specific task
(watching a TV programme, etc.), followed by a number of questions
that provide some direction for the students’ thinking. Some of these
strands of meaning are then developed in subsequent sections of the
teaching – in this case, those connected with writing’s appeal to the
imagination. The tasks themselves almost always involve reading a
story or poem (characteristic objects of study/text genres); through a
series of related questions, students are offered a staged approach to
their reading, and analysis and interpretation of it. In ensuing
discussion of these activities, the teacher-writer anticipates the stu-
dents’ likely responses and recasts these responses in terms closer to
those of the ‘target’, academic, discourse (a process that we saw at
work in the classroom in the ‘Araby’ vignette). In these ways, the
students’ thinking and growing understanding is channelled in
fruitful directions.

Activities are always concrete tasks, put as precisely as possible, so

that students may indeed make some constructive sense of them. But
in later parts of the module less ‘scaffolding’ is provided and, through
the activities, students are taken closer to the heart of contemporary

Methods of teaching

131

literary-critical concerns and categories. For instance, having read a
poem (If Life’s a Lousy Picture, Why Not Leave Before the End by Roger
McGough, which plays on the theme of the Hollywood Western),
students are presented with this scenario:

Imagine for a moment that you had spent all your life in another country which
had no cinema or television. However, you can speak English and have some
experience of reading poetry. What do you think you would make of this poem?
Would there be parts of it that you wouldn’t understand?

(Words: 62)

The author then explores what historical and cultural knowledge the
reader would need in order to understand reference to a ‘deserted
kinema’ with ‘torches extinguished’ and ‘cornish ripples locked
away’,

along with such word play as:

The tornoff tickets chucked
in the tornoff shotbin

(p. 63)

This particular instance leads into more general discussion of the
assumptions writers make about their readers’ shared frameworks of
knowledge and experience. A further Activity asks students to guess
how a story will develop after reading only the opening paragraph,
which leads to discussion of how we distinguish between literary
genres and understand the expectations they raise in us as readers –
abilities we acquire from familiarity with literature itself. In other
words, by the end of this introductory module students are led to
some understanding of the contemporary, and sophisticated, concept
of ‘intertextuality’.

Process

Study skills

Throughout, the students are asked to write down their ideas in
response to these exercises, not just think about them, at first as jotted
notes; later on they are asked to compose paragraph-length responses
and, towards the end of the module, they are given guidance in how
to make a case in essay form using appropriate evidence in support of

Teaching & Learning English Literature

132

their argument. Although such skills are an integral part of the subject
matter of study, and are always taught in this ‘situated’ manner,
aspects of them are picked out for special emphasis in occasional
Study Skills boxes. Students are also required to read parts of a set
book on study skills progressively, alongside their work on the
module text.

As with other exercises, these study skills activities arise out of the

students’ actual experience. When they reach the end of Section 1 of
the module, for example, a box entitled ‘Getting Organised’ asks them
to work out how long they had spent studying the section, which parts
were the most time-consuming and why they think this was so – with
assistance from the relevant part of the study skills book. On the basis
of that understanding, the students are then asked to skim-read Section
2 and try to organise themselves and their time in advance of studying
it. Later on, following a section of analysis and then comparison of two
short stories, guidance is given on how to make notes that summarise
the similarities/differences in structure and treatment the students had
been asked to identify in previous activities. Other boxes deal in
similar fashion with such matters as ‘Interpretation and Evidence’,
‘Understanding Ideas’, ‘Discussing Ideas’ and ‘Writing’ – all of them
centrally important study processes. Note that students are not simply
‘told about’ these skills and processes; they always practise them, to
some extent, before being asked to reflect on them.

Metacognition

Through activities of this kind students are encouraged to think about
how they go about their studies at appropriate moments, and their
attention is drawn to some of the key processes involved in it. In other
words, they are helped to understand what they are doing, and why,
while they are doing it – on the assumption that people cannot
participate in something mindfully unless they have some understand-
ing of what that thing is and what they might be aiming for. They are
thus introduced, at an early stage, to the idea of reflecting on their own
studying and learning. That is, they are encouraged to engage in
metacognitive activity. This takes us beyond Bruner’s idea of a ‘spiral’
of learning (of progression from a relatively simple and concrete
characterisation of the domain of knowledge to higher – abstract,
complex and generative – levels (Chapter 4)) to the perception that the
higher levels, or ‘mastery’, of the discipline also entail increasing

Methods of teaching

133

metacognitive understanding of its purposes and processes. To be
knowledgeable, then, is not just a matter of being able to participate in
the specialist discourse of a knowledge community but also of being
aware both that this is what one is doing and of what it is that one is
doing.

Teacher- versus student-centredness revisited

It will be apparent from this discussion that in the early stages of
higher education it is not helpful for teachers to think in terms of
individual students’ prior knowledge or experience and, on that basis,
to teach incrementally in accordance with precise, predetermined
instructional objectives or outcomes. Nor is it helpful, we believe, to
imagine that the only other recourse is to student-centredness: to
negotiated aims and curricula, self-reflection and ‘discovery’. For this
is the opposite face of the same, individualistic, coin – in its different
way, just as anti-intellectual and asocial. Rather, students are here
conceived as members of societies and language groups – as encul-
tured, subject to the historical and cultural influences that both
constrain and enable us all; and also as mindful – thinking, feeling
beings who have interests, intentions and aspirations. Again, just like
the authors they read. Likewise, Literature (as all academic disciplines)
is a product of history and culture, and also a communicative process
constantly in the making. Such beliefs are what underpin a socio-
cultural conception of higher education.

It will also be apparent that in the context of a discursive, dialogic

discipline such as Literature, talk about teacher- or student-centred-
ness is misleading. In dialogue, the notion of a ‘central’ participant is
inappropriate – the whole point of dialogue is that it doesn’t centre on
one person. But if we must talk in these terms, then in a socio-cultural
conception of the educational process teaching is student-centred and
teacher-centred. We have just seen that teaching always ‘starts from
where the students are’, acknowledging the value of their experience,
their ideas, beliefs and aspirations, and promoting their active partici-
pation. And what is ultimately achieved in education is of course what
the students achieve – with the assistance of teachers (the people who
have made it their business to learn about, understand and ‘speak’ the
public discourses in which the students wish to participate). As
teachers we help students achieve most by teaching them in ways that
are consistent with such an understanding of the nature and purposes

Teaching & Learning English Literature

134

of higher education, and by making courses of study as positively
engaging, accessible and interesting as we can. Clearly, that takes
sympathy and imagination as well as knowledge.

So, how can teachers think sympathetically and imaginatively about

the ways they teach? The answer, we would say, is by putting students
at the centre of their thinking. Instead of surveying a range of possible
teaching-learning methods and selecting among them on the basis of
abstract principles or beliefs about their effectiveness, or instead of
cleaving to what is traditionally done, let’s think about what the
discussion so far has suggested our students (as students) really need
a teacher’s help with. Then we can think about the best ways to
provide that assistance.

ORKING METHODS: METHODS THAT WORK

In summary, what we have seen that the students need is a teacher
who:

provides frameworks for their understanding each time a new
subject/topic is encountered – presents ideas and devises activ-
ities that help focus the students’ minds on the topic to be studied,
sets them thinking constructively about it and along fruitful lines
(providing less scaffolding over time);

keeps those frameworks before the students as they progress and
their understanding develops – invents core questions and a
teaching narrative for each course of study: a storyline that
encompasses the different kinds of subject matter and activity
involved in it (both methods and media); sustains strands of
meaning; summarises progress regularly and provides frequent
reminders of key ideas and issues;

does not make assumptions about their knowledge and skill (of
subject matter or of how to go about their studies) – explains and
illustrates new/difficult concepts, technical and other terms;
devises a realistic study timetable, maintaining a steady pace that
enables sufficient time for reading primary and secondary sour-
ces, thinking about and assimilating new ideas, completing
activities and assignments . . ., and is prepared to adjust it;

helps ‘translate’ students’ verbal and written contributions into
terms closer to those of the target, literary-analytical and critical

Methods of teaching

135

discourses – acts as a model of how debate is conducted in the
discipline and how scholarly argument works;

provides a structured, and staged, approach to reading different
literary texts/genres – with processes of analysis-interpretation-
evaluation at its heart – and to writing essays, using appropriate
illustration and evidence from both primary and secondary
sources, and being precise and ‘objective’;

helps them discuss their thoughts with other students, communi-
cate ideas effectively and work productively with others – leads
seminar-style discussions and offers student-led sessions; devises
small-group and team work;

helps them think about study practices and reflect on their
learning and achievements – offers opportunities for discussion of
self-organisation and time management, making useful notes,
approaching various study tasks . . . (both early on and when they
have had some experience of trying to do these things).

It looks likely that these various needs will be better met via some
teaching-learning methods and media than others. We will explore
that idea in what follows. The discussion is again structured around
the students’ learning needs, as students of Literature. Accordingly,
abstracting from the list above, we can see that our students learn to
do all these things in four main ways: by reading, listening, speaking
and writing. (And, of course, thinking; but we will assume that
thinking is going on all the time.)

Reading

In Literature courses students do almost all their reading independent-
ly, in private study. To their teachers, then, reading is largely an
invisible process – even though it is what the students spend most of
their time doing. Furthermore, we tend to assume that our students,
who have chosen to study Literature, can just do it: that they already
know how to read literary works of all kinds. We are, of course, wrong
in making that assumption. And even more wrong nowadays than
once we were, bearing in mind the student-demographic changes
discussed earlier (and see under ‘The student’s point of view’ in
Chapter 2 the broader cultural changes that have tended to mar-
ginalise reading, especially among younger people). Many students

Teaching & Learning English Literature

136

find it difficult to read critically (analytically and interpretatively).
McGann et al. (2001: 144), for example, have found that while reading
poetry (‘a frankly intransigent medium’) and non-fiction are acknow-
ledged as relatively difficult, students approach classic novels ‘with
pleasure and a certain kind of understanding’ – as long as the novels
are not ‘self-consciously reflexive or experimental’. However, the
authors continue:

That pleasure and understanding . . . proved a serious obstacle to the
students’ ability to think critically about the works and their own
thinking. It generated a kind of ‘transparency effect’ in the reading
experience, preventing the students from getting very far towards
reading in deliberate and self-conscious ways.

Here they refer to the ‘problem’ of fiction’s tendency to draw the
reader away from ‘the world of its words’ and towards character
(which students interpret as if it were ‘real’), plot (as if it were a
sequence of events), scene and ideas or ‘themes’. The challenge is ‘to
develop awareness of the fictionality of fiction with writers like Austen
and Scott, Eliot and Hardy’ (pp. 145–6). Clearly, students cannot just
read even classic texts.

But difficulty is not necessarily a negative, ‘a sign of failure and

inadequacy, to be suppressed or hidden’ (Parker, 2003: 144). Parker
cites Salvatori (2000: 84) as saying:

My own approach to reading and to interpretation of texts is very much
shaped by the work I do with phenomenology and hermeneutics, reader
response and reception theory. [So] the questions I ask as teacher are the
distillation of my understanding of reading as a process involving
difficult moments, which I see not as a sign of inadequacy on the reader’s
part, but rather as signs that the reader has sensed and/or identified a
textual difficulty that she needs to capture and engage, interpret and
respond to.

That said, there are broadly two different things that teachers can try
to do in this situation: (1) help students to read different literary
texts/genres appropriately and well; (2) help them make good use of
all the time they spend reading.

Methods of teaching

137

Genre

As regards the former, teachers may take a direct role by devoting class
time to discussing the different literary genres (prose, poetry, drama),
with a focus on their purposes, forms and formal elements, and also
offer guided reading exercises for some representative texts. Exploration
of the genres and sub-genres could be tackled in lectures during the first
year of study, often in period- or theme-based courses and preferably
alongside the students’ work on particular texts that represent the
genres. Or seminar time could be devoted to it: teacher-led explanation
followed by class discussion of the texts from the generic point of view.

Guided reading

With respect to guided-reading exercises, other possibilities present
themselves. Here we have in mind ways of ‘talking students through’
the process of reading a short story or poem, for example – indicating
where they might stop and think, and why; just what they might be
thinking about at various points; where they might want to refer back
to earlier lines or passages . . . – all the while employing the relevant
analytical categories and terms. Since these kinds of exercise will be
needed for each intake of new students, it might well be worth
investing time in developing materials that can be used by them
outside class – an audio-cassette (which students can stop and start
whenever they wish) or an online interactive programme, for example.
Also, it is now possible to access a vast library of digital resources and
texts from around the world – e-books such as in Project Gutenberg
(www.gutenberg.net)

– and digitised material that may be analysed

using text analysis software packages which can count the number of
occurrences of words or phrases even in long, complex texts such as
novels. A concordance or KWIC (Key Word in Context) list, or a
TextArc view of Hamlet, for instance, takes minutes when done via the
Internet and can enable students to see the locations and uses of any
specified name, word or phrase in the play. In this context, then,
guided reading of a short text might take the form of the teacher
supplying a few of his or her key words or phrases which students can
explore for themselves using a concordance facility.

Reading strategies

In the second case, of helping students make good use of the time they
must spend reading, by contrast the teacher might play the role of

Teaching & Learning English Literature

138

facilitator – providing the time and a forum for students to discuss
among themselves how they approach their reading of different text
genres, how much time they devote to reading, when and where they
do it, and so forth. If seminar discussion time is at a premium, good
use can be made of the kinds of course website that most university
departments now host. Apart from their use as repositories of
information about the department’s policies and courses, spaces on a
course website can be devoted to discussion among the students in a
(synchronous or asynchronous) computer conference. In this case, a
conference could be dedicated to discussion of reading (and other
study methods too, perhaps especially essay writing). And if teacher
time is also scarce, this might be a private conference which the
teacher does not visit. However, a couple of students could be charged
to report back the gist of the discussion periodically, in class time, thus
enabling some contribution from the teacher.

Workload

These suggestions of course apply to reading primary, literary texts.
But literature students must also read a range of theoretical and critical
works – reading that is very different in kind and must be tackled
differently, as we discussed in Chapter 3. Here, we would just add that
it is important not to overload the students with reading material of
this secondary kind, especially with long book lists of unannotated
items among which they are expected to select (on what possible
basis?). Indeed, by applying the following rules of thumb, teachers can
work out in advance how long it will take the ‘average’ student to read
secondary texts:

fairly familiar text/easy reading: c.100 words per minute;

moderately difficult text/close reading: c.70 words per minute;

dense, difficult text/unfamiliar reading: c.40 words per minute.

These are not reading speeds but ‘study rates’ – reading for under-
standing – which allow time for thinking and a fair bit of rereading.
On this basis, assuming a working week of c.40 hours, we may
calculate the time we are actually asking our students to spend reading
each week.

Making this calculation is a salutary experience, especially

when many secondary texts can be read only at around 40 or in some
cases 70 words per minute (Chambers, 1992).

Methods of teaching

139

1. Reading online for any length of time can cause eye and back strain. Whenever

possible, teachers and students alike are advised to read lengthy texts in print, and
especially literary works, since they are portable, they can be annotated and, in any
case, it’s more pleasurable.

2. Reading online is different. People tend to scan the screen rather than read every

word sequentially, picking out key words, paying attention to the format of the
presentation and looking for links to other websites and materials. Material usually
needs to be redrafted for presentation on the web, in short ‘chunks’ with important
points made at the start to aid scanning (see Nielsen (1997), accessed October
2004).

3. Online materials and resources must be integrated into the course design for them

to be worth using (see Kirkwood (2003), accessed October 2004).

4. It is important that we all respect intellectual property rights when using the

Internet and the copyright on information made available through the electronic
media. Your university will be able to advise you about the laws and conventions
governing this.

IGURE

5.1

Online reading: four caveats.

Accessing texts

Accessing such secondary material can also present difficulties,
especially for students who have responsibilities other than study or
who work unsocial hours. Here, electronic access may be vital. Course
websites can of course include links to other relevant sites and materials
on the Internet – including online dictionaries and encyclopaedias,
which, along with literary works and databanks of information, are also
often available on CD-ROM (but see Fig. 5.1). Sometimes, texts may be
downloaded to the site so that students can print material directly from
it. And there will almost certainly be a link to the university’s
searchable library catalogue, via its intranet, and perhaps also to an
electronic library from which articles can be downloaded. Such flexible
and speedy access to materials can make the difference between
students successfully completing their studies and dropping out.

Finally, we would re-emphasise something that applies to reading

both primary and secondary texts. If a text of either kind is to be the
focus for discussion, in a lecture or seminar/computer conference, it
is very helpful to students if they are asked to prepare themselves for
their listening or speaking by thinking about two or three questions
while and after they read it. These questions, identified by the teacher
in advance, should be few, short, clear and related to matters of
significance: the kinds of question that might focus the students’

Teaching & Learning English Literature

140

attention appropriately, keep them actively engaged in their reading
and help them think along fruitful lines. When a reading list is
provided on paper/on a website before the course begins or at the
start (as in the sample course outlines in Appendix 3 on the book’s
website) then such questions could be included under each item.
Generally, this is a much more productive strategy – for the develop-
ment of students’ understanding and the quality of any ensuing
discussion session – than taking the students unawares during the
session or (worse) showing them up in front of their peers and so
running the risk of alienating them (which of course would be
unethical as well as counterproductive). And, as a result, students may
begin to generate their own good questions.

Listening

Students mostly listen to lectures, but they may also need to listen to
audio-cassettes, the radio, CDs and (while also watching) TV pro-
grammes, DVDs and multimedia packages on computer or CD-ROM –
for performances of plays, poetry and story readings, discussions with
authors, critics’ forums and novel serialisations, screen adaptations,
etc. As this list suggests, a major task for teachers these days is seeking
out and reviewing all the potentially useful materials that are available
across a range of media. But online ‘portals’ or gateways to digital
resources that have been assessed for teaching-learning quality can
take away much of the pain, considerably reducing the time and effort
involved – see, for example, the Humbul Gateway (www.hum-
bul.ac.uk/english), Voice of the Shuttle (http://vos.ucsb.edu) or the
Australian E-Humanities Gateway (www.ehum.edu.au). The Moving
Image Gateway (www.bufvc.ac.uk/gateway) provides recordings of
TV programmes for use in teaching, along with a database of stage and
screen resources, and TRILT (Television and Radio Index for Learning
and Teaching – www.trilt.ac.uk) offers a comprehensive record of
British broadcasting. As we saw just now, resources such as these can
often be linked electronically to a course website so that students can
access them easily.

Listening in lectures

Generally speaking, listening is not a skill we have to learn. It is a
capacity that most of us (whose hearing is not impaired

) just have,

and we do it all the time. However, students listening in a lecture or

Methods of teaching

141

to a CD are a special case; here, listening usually means not just
attending to someone or something but really concentrating and
taking it in. Perhaps that’s why in education people often refer to
listening ‘skills’. Students do have to practise this kind of ‘listening
hard’ to get the most out of any of the teaching-learning methods that
rely on it, just as teachers should be aware of the advantages and
difficulties involved in those methods.

To take the example of listening to a good lecture, the great

advantage is that the burden of establishing a framework for under-
standing the topic and sustaining a flow of meaning is largely borne
by the speaker. (The corollary is of course that teachers must provide
these things.) Student listeners certainly need to work at making sense
of what they hear, but even when they are not familiar with some
terms or don’t understand parts of what is said, they can often follow
the gist of it – unlike reading a critical essay, for example, when
because the reader can rely only on his or her own resources the
enterprise may not even get off the ground, or at any stage glimmer-
ings of understanding may simply fade away. As speakers, teachers
invest meaning in their utterances – through their emphases and tones
of voice, facial expressions, gestures and such like – all of which can
help support the students’ understanding. And sometimes an accom-
panying visual display, using slides or PowerPoint is similarly helpful.

But we all know that lectures are not always successful. In fact, they

get very bad press in the higher education literature. Since Donald
Bligh’s What’s the Use of Lectures?, first published in 1971 and now in
its fifth edition (Bligh, 1998), the lecture method has been denigrated,
almost ritualistically. It is nowadays often seen as self-indulgently
teacher-centred, preferred by those who like to strut their stuff, in the
process rendering their students mute and passive. Students can’t
keep up with the speaker, we are told, they can’t concentrate for
longer than ten minutes together, they can’t take notes, think and
listen at the same time, and afterwards they can barely remember
anything that was said. Some of these things certainly present
difficulties. The pace at which the argument is developed may indeed
be misjudged. And students do have to learn how to listen, think and
jot down ideas more or less simultaneously. But mostly these charges
simply miss the point, because they are based on the assumption that
the primary function of a lecture is to impart information – even though
information is much more easily and reliably gained from books,
articles and websites.

Teaching & Learning English Literature

142

Rather, the lecture is particularly helpful in engaging the students’

interest and enthusiasm for a new topic, in providing the broad
context for study of it (which they cannot gain from books), and, after
study, in offering a summation and a weighing up of significance.
Crucially, what lectures offer students is the opportunity to hear an
argument developed, without interruption, by an ‘expert speaker’ of
the discourse – a live model of how the ideas of the discipline are used:
how arguments take shape, are illustrated and supported with
evidence; how they connect to wider debate within the discipline; how
conclusions are drawn. If at the same time the lecture is stimulating,
even inspiring, because teachers communicate genuine enthusiasm for
their subject, so much the better. The lecture, as one among very many
teaching-learning methods, must play to its strengths. Far better that
students should emerge from it reinvigorated, or feeling that they have
‘seen’ something significant, than that they should be able to repro-
duce dollops of information.

Planning lectures

As teachers, our first thoughts about a series of lectures are often,
understandably, to do with what (of the syllabus) is going to be
‘covered’ in them rather than what in particular this method of
teaching-learning can offer the students and what may get in the way of
that. From the students’ perspective, if the lecture is to be experienced
as interesting and helpful then teachers need to bear in mind some
issues surrounding the conditions of their listening – for example,
density of ideas and pace of delivery. Such matters involve judgement
about the rate at which students can absorb ideas: too thick and fast and
they will flounder, too slow and they will become bored and distracted.
Teachers must also make allowance for the fact that at the same time as
listening to what is said the students are trying to think about it, and
also jot down some notes to remind them of the main points of interest.
In view of all this, students surely should not be expected to listen hard
for more than about 30–40 minutes. If the timetable stipulates longer
sessions in a lecture theatre, then listening can be punctuated by, for
example, short readings (sometimes tape-recorded), interludes of
discussion (if only with the person in the next seat), jotting down notes
in answer to a question (preferably one that is about to be raised, again
to channel the students’ thoughts appropriately), doing a little quiz or
some other mildly entertaining activity.

Methods of teaching

143

But what students are mainly trying to do in a lecture is follow the

argument. All that was said earlier in discussion of the Words module,
about the need to provide (contextualising) frameworks for students’
understanding and to make clear the structure of the developing
argument, reiterating key points and summarising progress frequently
applies here – and applies to every lecture. When planning a lecture
series, an all-encompassing teaching narrative needs to be plotted,
otherwise each lecture is likely to be perceived by students as a
discrete entity. The series will seem like bits of this and that rather
than a coherent ‘story’ which, through its structuring, helps develop
their understanding.

Speaking

The opportunity for students to learn through speaking usually means
offering group work of some kind: seminars, tutorials, workshops,
team projects. Of these, literature teaching in the UK undoubtedly
relies most heavily on the seminar (usually of between 11 and 20
participants) which often involves student presentations, as evidence
from the English Subject Centre survey shows (and as we see in the
sample course outlines in Appendix 3). Sixty-four per cent of the
literature departments offer ‘half and half’ lectures and group dis-
cussion classes, while 34 per cent of them offer ‘mainly group
discussion’ – and, if you’ve done the sum, you will have deduced that
only 2 per cent of departments offer ‘mainly lectures’ (Halcrow et al.,
2003: 28–9). Also, ‘almost all respondents provide one-to-one disserta-
tion tutorials and consultations on demand’ (p. 32). What all such
sessions have in common is that they normally interact with the
students’ reading of primary and secondary texts, and they allow
students to negotiate meaning and understanding with others. In the
words of the English Benchmark Statement (QAA, 2000: 5):

Teaching arrangements in English programmes should provide a balance
of direct instruction . . . and the opportunity for active assimilation,
questioning and debate. The focussed discussion of reading lies at the
heart of learning in the subject. It is important that students are able
to engage in dialogue, and develop and negotiate conclusions with
others . . .

Teaching & Learning English Literature

144

Dialogue

The ‘Araby’ vignette in Chapter 2 illustrated the value to us of the
seminar as a teaching-learning method (as well as some of its pitfalls).
Through discussion, students can experience new ideas ‘in action’, in
others’ and their own talk, fairly informally. Compared to reading and
listening, discussion among peers is usually easier to follow, dynamic,
spontaneous and potentially exciting. Students may positively enjoy
the feeling of being part of a lively community of thinkers. Carried
along in a flow of discussion, in which others share in the task of
constructing and sustaining frameworks for understanding, they can
find themselves saying things they did not even know they thought.
Together, the students can push their understanding further ahead
than they might on their own – as they hear others trying to sort out
their ideas, they rework their own or glimpse new ways of understand-
ing the topic. Questions are asked and answered, and understandings
shared. The students know instantly whether they have communicated
well and been understood, and they can try again. Crucially, such talk
gives students rough and ready, first-hand knowledge of how to
‘speak’ the academic discourse and how to develop arguments
appropriately, which helps them do so more formally in written
assignments. Taking their cue from teachers, over time they may learn
to adopt the detached, precise ‘voice’ of critical analysis.

Managing discussion

‘May’ is the operative word here, since of course everything depends
on how teachers set up and conduct these sessions. We saw in Chapter
2 how uncomfortable and relatively fruitless the experience can be
when a class is not prepared for the subject of discussion and the
session itself is not sufficiently structured. The novice teacher of
‘Araby’ would have done well to ask the students to focus on a few
questions when reading the text before the class, and to begin the
seminar by exploring one of those questions (rather than with the
mind-boggling, ‘So . . . what do you think of this story?’). Following
the vignette, we discussed a number of pedagogic strategies that
promote intelligible, meaningful discussion which we will not repeat
here. Rather, we will focus on the pressing question of how to engage
the students and get them all working cooperatively together – rather
than not participating at all, communicating only with the teacher or
having a few verbose students crowd out the rest.

Methods of teaching

145

We saw in Chapter 2 that a helpful strategy is to break up the class

into groups, each with a well-focused question to discuss or task to do,
along with instructions regarding reporting back to the class as a
whole – prior to plenary discussion in which the teacher, building on
their contributions, plays a central role in restructuring, extending and
summing up the discussion. In small groups of four or five it is almost
impossible for any student to remain disengaged or silent. The teacher
is absent from these discussions and so cannot be the focus of attention
at that stage (which also has the effect of placing limits on the teacher’s
own enthusiasm to contribute). And very talkative or aggressively
dominant students may be allotted the formal, and circumscribed, role
of spokesperson for the group at the reporting-back stage, which
should occupy them usefully during the discussion or work period –
a role that could of course be rotated among group members over
time. In any event, we should not underestimate how maddening
these students can be, especially those who constantly either focus on
themselves, their experiences and ideas or seem unable to focus on the
topic at hand. It is of course the job of the teacher to find ways of
stemming the flow or redirecting proceedings in the interests of
everyone. The problem may be addressed during a seminar by
tactfully changing tack or trying to draw other students into the
discussion. But if this is too socially embarrassing, it is always possible
to take such a student aside afterwards and talk things over. An
equivalent move in a computer-conference discussion might be to
communicate with the student ‘outside’ the conference via private
e-mail (in this connection and others to do with the conduct of
computer conferences, see Salmon, 2002).

But, in whatever manner, teachers must address this problem. If we

fail to take that responsibility then, no matter how well prepared the
seminar, many students will tune out; they will not benefit from it and,
worse, they may (understandably) be reluctant to attend in future.

The ‘communicative virtues’

Or the students may get so frustrated that they become abusive to
some of their fellow students. An important educational purpose of
seminar discussion and teamwork is development of the so-called
communicative virtues – tolerance of other people’s points of view,
respect for differences among the group, willingness to listen to others
(in the spirit that one might be wrong), and patience and self-restraint

Teaching & Learning English Literature

146

so that others may have a turn to speak or act. If these principles are
breached then the teacher’s role is not just a ‘technical’ one of policing
the ground rules of cooperative work but the more fundamental one
of ensuring that all the students learn this important aspect of the
discipline (indeed, of any discipline). And of course this means that
we, as teachers, must demonstrate these principles in our own
behaviour towards students and colleagues. In particular, respecting
differences among people should guide our behaviour towards those
at the other end of the spectrum from the verbose student, those who
are shy and do not readily participate.

Earlier we touched on the issue of whether we should be especially

concerned about these students, pointing out that silence does not
necessarily indicate lack of engagement. However, in view of the
constructive gains to be made from well-focused, lively discussion, if
students are not actively encouraged to participate then they will miss
important opportunities to learn – a view supported in the QAA
Subject Overview report (1995): ‘In a number of observed seminars,
students were given too few opportunities to contribute, and were
consequently encouraged to become relatively passive’. The reviewers
continue:

Lectures and seminars remain the most frequently employed means of . . .
teaching . . . They are generally most successful when supplemented by
student presentations that are often explicitly linked to the development
of skills as well as to the evolution of discipline-specific knowledge.

Another common ploy to involve all the students, then, is to require
them to take turns, in twos or threes, to make presentations in
seminars and/or to lead the discussion.

Seminar presentations

We saw this strategy adopted in the sample course outlines, where a
formal ‘oral presentation’ is an assessed component of courses at every
level. In part, this requirement is no doubt designed to ensure that all
the students participate actively. At Level 1 (Appendix 3(a)), the
purpose of the 15-minute presentation is explained to the students and
also the presenters’ responsibility to their audience:

Presentations help you clarify and structure your thoughts on some
aspect of the module – you decide which topic to work on – and they

Methods of teaching

147

make you think about ways and means of expressing yourself orally.
Unlike essays, they are a part of the learning experience for the whole
group. An effective delivery benefits not only the presentees but also the
audience; please bear this in mind as you prepare for this part of your
assessment . . .

In both these cases, small-group discussion and oral presentations, the
students are also learning how to work together on specific tasks to
deadlines. But of course group or team projects may take a variety of
other forms: for example, bibliographic or IT/web-based exercises,
performances, creating resources (such as audiotapes or videos),
written assignments (from book or film reviews to research-based
projects involving the students’ own investigations). In all such cases,
students will need guidance from teachers on how to go about the task
and some ground rules for their collaborative efforts. Of perhaps
greater concern, however, is how to assess such group work appro-
priately and fairly, as we shall see in Chapter 6.

Student preparation

Meantime, teachers often complain that students cannot participate in
seminars and other discussion or group-work sessions, however well
they are conducted, because they are ill prepared for them: that
students simply fail to do the reading or carry out the tasks required
of them in advance. And this is seen as a growing problem which is
largely beyond the teacher’s control, exacerbated by rising fees and the
need for many students to work part-time in order to support
themselves. However, there are a few things that teachers may do in
this situation. First, the onus is on us as teachers to make sure that
what we ask of students is, in fact, doable in the time allotted to their
studies. As we saw, we can ensure this only by carefully controlling
the amount of reading and other work that we set. That achieved, it is
then reasonable to adopt some of the measures identified earlier and
justified there solely on educational grounds: to make seminar/
workshop attendance compulsory and keep a register; to include
student-led sessions such that at some time during the course each
student must present a paper, individually or with one or two
partners; formally to assess the students’ contributions to seminar and
group work. In this context of discussion, such measures perhaps take

Teaching & Learning English Literature

148

a more draconian turn: in the first two cases, a penalty for failure to
comply may be attached; in the last, a penalty is inbuilt.

Engaging students

But, ultimately, as teachers it must be our aim to interest and engage
our students to the extent that they want to participate fully in their
courses of study. Should this sound hopelessly unrealistic or even
utopian to your ears, we recommend that you revisit the notion of a
‘framing, existential pedagogy’ explored in Chapter 1. There we
discussed the importance of making connections between literature
and the enduring terms and conditions of human existence – keeping
in view serious and permanent issues of human physicality and
sociability – such that studying literature is experienced by students
as not only interesting but also important. After all, if it is not seen as
important, why – given the many demands, desires and distractions
that beset us – would any of us bother to study it seriously? In short,
we believe that an approach to teaching in which literary experience
is taken to be an important form of human learning is both most valid
and most likely to inspire our students. One such approach is
discussed in Chapter 1 (under ‘A framing pedagogy: existential
‘‘sidebar’’ issues’) and another is exemplified in this chapter in our
discussion of the socio-cultural principles and practices governing
teaching in the Words module.

We give the last word here to Ben Knights. In focusing on the ‘study

group’, he acknowledges that this focus ‘is in some degree to counter
the culture of the subject, since the ideology of ‘‘English’’ is strongly
individualistic even where it ostensibly proposes co-operation’. Never-
theless:

The students’ institutional experience is one of groups. This experience
is intersubjective; the forms of dialogue practised there become the forms
of thinking that characterise the subject. . . . To build on the group
nature of learning in our subject, consciously to construct experimental
cultural communities, may be . . . an alternative to what is frequently
seen as the rigid opposition between solid knowledge and objective skills
on the one hand and the personal response and creative engagement of
the individual reader on the other. Students and teachers need to learn
about the narratives within which self and learning are constructed.
Those narratives are simultaneously cognitive and affective – learning

Methods of teaching

149

cannot be dissociated from the emotional matrix within which it takes
place.

(Knights, 1992: 3)

Writing

Of all the activities discussed here, writing is usually experienced by
students as the most difficult – and especially essay writing. As we
saw in Chapter 3, academic writing is not mainly a matter of acquiring
skills but, rather, is intimately bound up in the students’ knowledge
and understanding of the discipline and involves a focus on making
meaning appropriately within its terms (Swales, 1990). Furthermore, in
essay writing, the student is the sole author of that meaning making.
And this form of writing is omnipresent. Indeed, in the UK:

In order to develop and demonstrate the skills [of communication of
ideas], to engage in informed written debate and to present ideas in a
sustained discursive form, English students must be required to write
essays as a fundamental part of their learning experience’.

(QAA, 2000: 5, emphases added)

Writing essays as part of studying a literature course is, then,
primarily a method of learning, and we would say the most profound
method of learning.

Understanding the assignment

Each essay assignment offers students the opportunity to focus on a
particular part or aspect of the syllabus (often of their choosing), study
it in depth, draw together their knowledge and understanding from
all sources, make appropriate selections from these sources and put
them to use. That is, they practise arguing a case (often in answer to a
specific question or for/against a given point of view), illustrating that
argument adequately and offering appropriate evidence in support of
it. Ultimately, students are offered constructive-critical feedback on
their performance by a teacher, from which they may learn further –
if that feedback is seen not just as a matter of correction but, primarily,
as an answering response to the meanings the students have attem-
pted to make. So it is not surprising that when students look back on
their studies, the texts or topics on which they have written an essay
are very often the ones they understood and remember best.

Teaching & Learning English Literature

150

( The straightforward ‘true’ question – such as: ‘How do the characters of Howards

End increase our understanding of issues related to class and gender?’; ‘What does
Morris have to say about the process of change in News from Nowhere?’

( The combined quote/question – ‘In what ways has Marlow, at the end of The Heart

of Darkness, departed from a ‘‘straightforward world of facts’’?’; ‘Dick’s work has
been described as embodying ‘‘in miniature all the complexities, contradictions,
hopes and anxieties of our post World War II world’’. How far would you agree
with this statement with reference to Do Androids Dream . . .?’

( The task – ‘Compare and contrast the exploration of difﬁcult moral choices by two

or more Victorian writers.’; ‘Analyse the relationship between repression and
biology as presented by Atwood’.

( The discussion/for and against – ‘ ‘‘Great Expectations is a moral tale told by an

amoral narrator’’. Discuss this statement with detailed reference to the novel.’

IGURE

5.2

Sample essay-question types.

Students experience writing an essay of, say, 1,500–2,000 words as a

far more difficult task than, for example, arguing in speech, because
the writer is solely responsible for providing and sustaining the
framework of meaning for the reader, for the process of writing itself
and for the eventual outcome. Furthermore, essay writing is a lengthy
and complex process. First of all, the students must understand the
task – what the essay question or title actually requires of them. A
wide range of such questions is included in the Appendix 3 sample
course outlines, and we can discern from these lists several types of
‘question’ that literature students are commonly asked to tackle (see
Figure 5.2). The last of these examples is probably the most ambigu-
ous, because ‘Discuss’ does not make it explicit that argument ‘for and
against’ a statement or quotation is what is required. And often
teachers set the complex task or cryptic question rather than the more
straightforward, even at First level – perhaps out of a desire to
challenge the students intellectually and a corresponding fear of
spoonfeeding them. In short, precisely what is required of the students
is by no means always readily apparent to them. And that is just the
start.

Understanding the tasks

Once students think they understand what is being asked of them,
they must then (although not necessarily in the order presented here):

Methods of teaching

151

1. Read the literary texts in question or choose them appropriately,

and engage in the necessary analytical, interpretative and evalu-
ative activities.

2. Find, read and apply relevant critical material.
3. Make notes from all sources towards their essay.
4. Think about and plot the line of argument they will develop in the

essay – including appropriate illustration of major claims and
evidence in support of them.

5. Structure the essay accordingly.
6. Write stylishly, persuasively and accurately.
7. Make good use of the scholarly apparatus.
8. Reflect and review: revise and polish their work.

Each of these elements may be experienced as difficult and time-
consuming. And students may not even conceive of the essay writing
process as a number of different (if overlapping) ‘tasks’, which must
make it all the more daunting as they set out to muddle through
somehow. For purposes of discussion we may identify the first task as
‘reading’, the second as ‘researching’ (2 and 3), the third as ‘arguing/
structuring’ (4 and 5), the fourth as ‘writing’ (6 and 7) and the last as
‘reflecting and reviewing’. In Chapter 3 of the book a focus was the
teaching of writing, and we presented there a process/staged ap-
proach to it that encompassed some of the tasks which are identified
here from the students’ point of view, while others have been explored
in this chapter. The elements of the process that remain to be discussed
are ‘researching’ and ‘reflecting’.

Researching

In fact we did touch on this matter in ‘Accessing texts’ (above), which
is obviously an important aspect of research. Even if, in the context of
essay-writing, ‘research’ is a rather grandiose term for what is a
relatively small-scale activity, nevertheless as an integral part of the
students’ study of Literature it is a set of skills that they must be
taught. In fact, most UK literature departments do regard this teaching
as essential, with 75 per cent of them claiming to offer training in
‘research-related skills’ (Halcrow Group et al., 2003: 52). In answer to
more specific questions, it emerged that over half the departments
include ‘Library use’ as a compulsory element at Level 1 and
‘Academic use of the Internet, e.g. RDN, Humbul, Literature online’

Teaching & Learning English Literature

152

and ‘General Internet searching skills’ as optional elements at all
Levels, in most cases with the assistance of library and technical staff
(p. 44). So on closer inspection it seems that, in fact, in almost half the
departments no such teaching is provided at all. And, further, when
we consider that in 98 per cent of departments students are required to
‘engage in independent research-based (dissertation or project) work’
(p. 51), this level of provision seems positively paltry. In addition, if
literature academics are serious about engaging their students with the
wealth of digital and web-based material available to us all, then
making sure that the students are trained in the necessary procedures
must be more than an optional extra. It is surely essential that students
are taught to approach e-resources (just as any source) critically – to
be able to discriminate between good resources and all the junk that
is available on the Web (see the MLA Handbook, 2000) – rather than
simply being let loose to Google their way around.

Reflecting/reviewing

By ‘reflecting’ we do not mean the kind of assignment in which
students are asked to reflect on their study of aspects of a course and
review their learning, their development, their strengths and weak-
nesses, etc. (see Thorpe, 2000, for example). Rather, in the context of
essay writing, we are referring to the stage at which the student looks
back over the draft essay and reviews what he or she has achieved
with an eye to improving it prior to submission. This necessarily
involves critical analysis of the essay draft – which, in turn, presup-
poses that the student has some knowledge of the criteria that might
apply to it (i.e. what would make for a good response to the question
or essay title). But this is precisely what most students, especially
beginning students, do not have. Lacking such knowledge, how can
they possibly improve the essay (beyond correcting spelling, grammar,
etc.)? And if we as academics find it tough being critical of our own
work, which most of us do, how much harder must it be for beginning
students to be so self-critical? As teachers we do well to remember that
good writing is a goal, not a starting point. So, critical review is also
something that needs to be taught.

We suggest that it would be amenable to the kind of heuristic

exercise discussed in Chapter 3 (under ‘Writing pedagogy’). Specifi-
cally, students could be asked to critique essays by other (anonymous)
students and, as an outcome, to discuss the criteria that might be

Methods of teaching

153

( Have you set out to answer the question/address the issues in the essay title, as it is

worded?

( Have you presented an argument? Is it clear that you have done so? Is your

argument developed throughout the essay, in a series of main points that are
linked, and do you reach a conclusion/sum up at the end?

( Have you drawn on relevant parts of the course and other relevant material for the

content of your essay to illustrate and provide evidence for the main points of your
argument?

( Is the organisation of your essay (i.e. in sections or paragraphs) appropriate?

Can each sentence be read and understood (i.e. have you said what you meant
to say)?

( Have you paid attention to the conventions for quoting from sources, to correct

grammar, spelling, etc.? Have you provided references in the approved way?

IGURE

5.3

Some basic criteria for critical review of the draft essay.

applied to these essays. This would help them to understand essay
requirements without first having to subject their own writing to
scrutiny. They might perhaps start out with a ‘generic’ list of criteria,
such as those in Figure 5.3, which would be applied to the particular
essays being critiqued, enabling the meanings and implications of each
question to be explored in context (what is meant by ‘relevant’
material, ‘appropriate’ organisation, etc., in the context of this essay
question/title). Subsequently, students would undoubtedly also bene-
fit from the kind of practice constructive exercises described in
Chapter 3, at this as at the other stages of writing.

Balancing voices

A different way of looking at the list of essay writing tasks is to
observe that, although the essay is a single-voiced expression, within
it the writer must encompass and find a balance between a number of
different ‘voices’: the texts concerned, the sources on which he or she
draws, her or his own voice. This is a major difficulty for students, and
most anxiety surrounds the last of these – the extent to which, or even
whether, the writer’s own voice should be heard. Furthermore, like
any writer, students are attempting to address an audience, which is
very often an unknown quantity as far as they are concerned. How
often have you as teacher asked a student why he or she didn’t explain
some matter of central importance in an essay only to be told

Teaching & Learning English Literature

154

something like ‘Well, I didn’t think I had to say that because you
already know it’? All these matters need to be discussed explicitly with
students.

The most important thing to be said here, then, is that it is part of

the teacher’s job to teach students how to write essays in Literature –
and, indeed, any other form of writing that is required of them (some
of which we discuss in Chapter 6). As in the case of reading literary
texts appropriately, we cannot just assume, as we once perhaps did,
that they already know how to do it. This educational researcher sums
up:

. . . research suggests that literacy practices are complex, contested,
specific, and, above all, contextualised . . . These studies suggest that the
development of students’ thinking and writing is often hampered by a
lack of explicitness within the teaching of the subject with regard to
the literacy norms . . . Such an idea challenges traditional fears that
explicitness about the details of academic practice is a form of
‘spoonfeeding’, which will lead to the erosion of standards and a
‘dumbing down’ of higher education. [The studies] suggest the need for
a shift from a view of success/failure based on ‘ability’ and ‘preparation’,
to one that sees study at this level as an apprenticeship into new ways
of thinking and expression for students . . . such new forms of expression
. . . need to be explicitly modelled and explored.

(Haggis, 2003: 100)

Writing in the Disciplines

Finally, we will just draw attention to this movement, based originally
at Cornell University’s Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines
(WiD), in case it should offer some inspiration. WiD is expressly
concerned with writing as a form of learning, with ‘writing to learn’
(Monroe, 2002; Donohue, 2004). What makes the movement distinctive
is its insistence on the discipline ‘as that which is written, and
therefore as that which is practised (rather than that which is . . .
researched)’:

. . . each Faculty’s writing course is taught not by ‘composition’ teaching
assistants but by the discipline’s writers at all stages of their career . . .
The conviction underpinning the programme is that . . . academics do
not ‘do’ and then ‘write up’ their work; rather they practice and write
the discipline. Thus the discipline is continuously being rewritten and

Methods of teaching

155

. . . by leading academics, graduates and students together . . . [This] new
inclusive definition brings together all into one community of practice.

(Parker, 2003: 146–7)

This is a radical and time-consuming programme since WiD courses
are by definition writing intensive. Course content is greatly reduced
to make way for weekly writing and revising assignments that, it is
hoped, will ultimately transform the students’ understanding of the
discipline.

LECTRONIC TEACHING METHODS

Scattered about the chapter are references to electronic and digital
resources, to websites and the Internet. These mentions have been
made in the context of the technologies’ uses in the teaching and study
of Literature, which is of course how we should as teachers think
about them. Here we offer a brief overview.

Broadly speaking, it is helpful to distinguish between two different

uses of information and communications technologies (ICTs) in this
context:

1. Broadcasting – delivering content/resources, including digital li-

brary resources (via the Internet) and material on DVD or CD-ROM,
largely for ‘knowledge transfer’ (teacher or writer to student) and
for research purposes.

2. Communicating – in online (two-way) dialogue, including e-mail

discussion lists, computer-mediated communication (CMC), List-
serves, etc., for purposes of discussion and collaborative learning.

Further information about these ICTs and addresses for useful
websites are included as Appendix 7 on the book’s website
(www.sagepub.co.uk/chambers.pdf).

Few Literature teachers are interested in these technologies as such.

What we want to know is how using ICTs might enable us to teach
our discipline more effectively, more efficiently or more imaginatively.
In other words, we should begin by thinking about the ways in which
ICTs might best serve our needs as Literature educators, that is,
thinking from the discipline to the available technologies. It will do us
no good simply to import e-teaching methods developed in other
disciplines for other purposes; for example, from disciplines that

Teaching & Learning English Literature

156

emphasise the computer’s extraordinary capacity to quantify or to
store and reproduce ‘information’, when what we are most interested
in is the analysis and evaluation of ideas, theories and processes – in
challenging, questioning and creating knowledge. In view of our
purposes and priorities we may wish to resist pressure to substitute
multiple choice or question and answer assessment for the essay form,
for instance, even if electronic assessment works well in other
academic contexts and is comparatively cheap. As a paper on the uses
of computers in history (in a special issue of the journal Computers and
the Humanities (Chambers, 2000)) demonstrates: ‘The crucial issues in
the use of computers in teaching are pedagogical and not technical’
(Spaeth and Cameron, 2000: 325). Or, as Charles Ess puts it, we must
not allow ‘the technological tail [to] wag the pedagogical dog’ (Ess,
2000: 298).

Common themes and recommendations that emerge from the

papers in this special issue are as follows.

1. Electronic methods and resources should be integrated with exist-

ing teaching practice, ensuring that they serve well-defined ‘higher
order’ purposes. Digital resources can complement classroom
activities, library use and existing teaching methods (i.e. ‘blended’
learning) – and even offer new possibilities.

2. Communications technologies offer increased opportunity for dis-

cussion among students and between them and their teachers,
formally (seminar-style) and informally (chat), whether syn-
chronously or asynchronously. These technologies also enable
collaborative work among groups of students, especially in distance
education and among international groups.

3. Digital texts of all kinds allow access ‘wherever and whenever’ and

eliminate the need for libraries to hold multiple copies (see AHDS,
Literature Online and the Oxford Text Archive, among others, in
the Bibliography at the end of the book, under ‘Websites’). Text
‘searching’ software offers new opportunities for textual analysis,
from the small to grand scale.

4. Databases of cultural artefacts can include rare or otherwise

inaccessible primary sources of all kinds (e.g. pictures, maps, audio
and video recordings). A range of different text-types may be
brought together on a website or on multimedia CD-ROM. These
are especially valuable towards independent work/research and
study of multidisciplinary fields.

Methods of teaching

157

5. The Internet and hypertext offer opportunities for creative work by

students, which may be assessed, e.g. constructing a web page;
guided exploration for good websites and source materials; exercis-
ing discrimination and skills of critical evaluation. The students’
choice of their own path through hypertext material may foster
self-reliance and a spirit of inquiry.

Finally, the caveats. As we saw, students need training in approaching
electronic resources critically, and teachers need training and time to
explore both the new possibilities and their integration in teaching
programmes. Teachers also need to learn to work more closely and
collaboratively with other staff, librarians and technical staff in
particular. Therefore some institutional change is entailed if ICTs are
to become a normal part of the curriculum and of teachers’ priorities.
These changes are well underway in universities in many countries
and will only accelerate.

OSTSCRIPT

Here and in earlier chapters of the book we have made reference to
the following teaching-learning methods: audio-visual, bibliographic,
collaborative group/team work, creative writing, performance, essay
writing, ICTs (DVD, CD-ROM, databases, search engines) and web-
based methods (computer conferencing, the Internet, websites), lec-
tures, oral presentations, project work/dissertations, reading (both
primary and secondary texts), seminars, small-group discussion,
tutorials, workshops. And others are discussed in Chapter 6. Plenty to
choose from?

While it is not the point of this list that surveying it we may

congratulate ourselves on the range of methods we use, it is no doubt
more interesting for our students if we offer them a variety of ways of
studying and learning in any given course. Indeed, some would say
that a variety of methods should be offered because students have
characteristic, and various, ‘learning styles’ – predominantly verbal or
visual – which educators must take account of. But can it be so, we
wonder, when a distance teaching institution such as the UKOU enrols
4–8,000 students every year in each of its introductory courses (Arts,
Social Sciences, Health and Social Care, the Sciences, Technology,
Maths and Computing . . .), all of whom study by means of the same

Teaching & Learning English Literature

158

methods and most of whom study successfully? Even if it were true
that students have different learning styles, the variety of teaching-
learning methods we have discussed here, as a result of considering
the students’ needs in relation to the study of Literature as a discipline,
would surely suffice? And such consideration of the students’ needs
ensures that the chosen teaching methods have the added advantage
of some rational justification.

So, we reiterate here what we have attempted to demonstrate in the

course of the chapter: we need to know why we use the various
teaching-learning methods we do, when and to achieve what. The point is
to make appropriate connections between what our students are likely
to need from us and the means available to us to help them fulfil their
potential as students of Literature. That there may be great tension
between these developmental and supportive aspects of our role as
teachers and the requirement that we also act as judge and assessor of
our students’ work is one of the issues discussed in the next chapter.

Notes

1. See Lyotard (1984), in particular ‘Education and its legitimation through

performativity’. Performativity is expressed in the ‘competency’ and ‘vocational
skills’ movements in the UK and the Outcomes Based Education movement in
South Africa, for example. These and movements like them (right back to the
behaviouralism applied to education in the mid-twentieth century) have long
been seen as the mistaken attempt to apply ‘ ‘‘scientific’’ . . . principles and
procedures in dealing with questions which fall outside the scope of science as
commonly understood’ (Standish, 1991: 171). For more recent critique see
Barnett (2003).

2. ‘Kinema’ refers to cinemas and ‘torches’ to the lights used by attendants to

show cinema-goers to their seats. ‘Cornish ripple’ is a type of ice cream.

3. For this and other useful websites see Appendix 7, the annotated website list

on the book’s website (www.sagepub.co.uk/chambers.pdf). The authors would
like to thank Simon Rae (UKOU) for compiling this Appendix, and for his
contributions to discussion of electronic methods in the text of the book.

4. Such a calculation may be made on the basis of any requirement regarding total

hours of study, and over any period (a term, a semester, a month, etc.). A more
sophisticated, and realistic, calculation would also involve estimating the time
needed for reading primary texts, and include the time students are expected
to spend in class, writing essays, etc. Research into student workload at the
UKOU suggests that our courses tend to be overloaded, perhaps especially
literature courses (given the length of many primary texts), so that often
students cannot possibly do the work expected of them in the time available,
let alone in the time advertised in course descriptions. There is no reason to
suppose that the situation is any different in conventional universities.

Methods of teaching

159

5. Special arrangements must of course be made for students whose hearing is

impaired, and indeed for all those who have any kind of disability. In the UK,
the SENDA (Special Educational Needs and Disability Act) 2001 spells out the
requirements (www.hmso.gov.uk/acts/acts2001/20010010.htm – accessed 25
October 2004). The TechDis website (www.techdis.ac.uk) provides resources
and tools, and discussion of the impact of SENDA on the UK further, higher
and specialist education sectors. See the Bibliography at the end of the book
under ‘Websites’.

Key references

Monroe, J. (2002) Writing and Revising the Disciplines. Ithaca, NY: Cornell

University Press.

Northedge, A. (2003) ‘Enabling participation in academic discourse’, Teaching in

Higher Education, 8(2): 169–80.

Websites

Australian e-Humanities gateway, at www.ehum.edu.au
Humbul Gateway, at www.humbul.ac.uk/english
Voice of the Shuttle, at http://vos.ucsb.edu

Teaching & Learning English Literature

160

4.2.1. The assessment of students should be explicitly linked to the learning processes
and outcomes of their degree programmes, which should recognise that assessment
signiﬁcantly inﬂuences how and what students learn. Assessment inheres in and
informs the learning process: it is formative and diagnostic as well as summative and
evaluative, and the process should provide students with constructive feedback.
Students should be given the opportunity to pursue original thought and ideas, and
encouraged to question received opinion.

4.2.2. The diversity of material and approaches, as well as programme objectives which
value choice and independence of mind, suggest that it is desirable for students of
English to experience a variety of assessment forms. Programmes should specify and
make explicit the overall rationale for their approach to assessment, make clear the
relationship between diagnostic and ﬁnal assessment, and ensure, within the variety of
approaches taken, that assessment is consistent in the demands it makes on students
and the standards of judgements it applies.

(QAA, 2000: 5)

IGURE

6.1

4.2. Assessment.

Student assessment

We have seen that thinking about what will be assessed and the ways
teachers will assess students’ (mainly written and oral) work is a part
of the planning cycle for teaching – not something tacked on, to be
considered when everything else is settled. And such decisions are of
course closely bound up with our teaching-learning aims and objec-
tives for the programme; as these become formulated we need to be
thinking about how each one might best be assessed. That is, we must
aim to assess in ways appropriate to the discipline all those things that
are centrally important for students to be able to do, to know and to
understand in the course of their education in Literature. Thus as
teachers we ensure that our assessment practices are valid: well
founded, sound and to the point.

The UK English Benchmark Statement puts assessment matters in a

nutshell, as shown in Figure 6.1.

If it is pretty obvious that assessment should be aligned to the

teaching-learning objectives of programmes and courses, it is equally
obvious that there is indeed a strong relationship between what will be
assessed and what students pay greatest attention to and give most time
to as they study. This is not meant as a cynical observation, implying that
all or even many students take a purely instrumental approach to their
studies (although, of course, we know that some do). A function of any
assessment regime is that it should act as a guide in this way, reinforcing
teachers’ priorities and helping the students to identify what activities,
knowledge and understanding are centrally important to their progress.

But many other ideas are packed into this Statement – criteria and

standards of assessment; the transparency of assessment regimes;
formative and summative modes of assessment; feedback to students;
consistency and fairness; variety in forms of assessment – all of which
are discussed in this chapter. We begin with the crucially important
question, how do we decide what to assess, when and to what
standards?

RANSPARENT ASSESSMENT CRITERIA AND STANDARDS

It turns out that the Benchmark Statement’s first injunction, that
assessment of students ‘should be explicitly linked to the learning
processes and outcomes of their degree programmes’, is not so much
an invitation to teachers to work these things out for themselves as it
may seem at first sight. For its authors go on to identify what the
assessment criteria for English programmes should be. This marks a
sea change, in two respects: the idea that student assessment should
be planned at the overarching level of the Literature programme; and
that any external body (such as the QAA) might recommend just what
higher education teachers should be assessing.

Until fairly recently it was customary for UK English departments

to have an assessment policy but individual teachers were largely
responsible for the form and conduct of it in ‘their’ courses. The sum
of the students’ achievements across all or certain of these courses then
determined their final grade/degree classification. However, attention
is now being focused on assessment of the programme as a whole: on
identifying programme-based learning objectives from which the
assessment criteria for the various courses that make it up can be
derived. This vantage point is said to ensure a less piecemeal approach

Teaching & Learning English Literature

162

to assessment and to enable more systematic planning of it throughout
the programme. It is regarded as far preferable from the point of view
of students. For when programme-based criteria are not identified
there is a danger that the criteria and standards of assessment applied
to individual courses are applied inconsistently by their teachers, even
to courses at the same level – with the students (especially in modular
study) having to try to anticipate what each teacher they encounter
expects and may favour. Criteria and standards may also be applied
inconsistently within the same course if more than one person is
involved in assessing the students’ work (for example, a lecturer and
graduate assistants). On the other hand, when the criteria and
standards of assessment of individual courses are derived from the
aims and objectives of the entire programme and are published, then
the students can be more confident that a team of teachers is assessing
their work on an agreed, consistent basis over the whole programme.

As regards academic departments and teachers, a requirement to

agree on assessment criteria and standards for the three- (or four-) year
programme should encourage debate about the modes and various
forms of assessment that might be appropriate, at what levels and in
which courses or modules in the programme. Further, apart from the
expected gains in consistent application of the criteria and in reliability
of marking, the idea is that once the learning objectives of the
programme are identified a selection of them can then be allocated to
its component courses – so reducing the number of different objectives
prioritised in any one course or module. As a result, it is said, our
assessment practice will become more focused and specific.

So, how might all this work out in Literature?

Programme assessment

According to the English Benchmark Statement, the core assessment
criteria for an English programme should be as shown in Figure 6.2.

Standards of achievement of these criteria are then identified at two

levels: threshold (the minimum requirement for honours graduates)
and modal (the level reached by ‘the typical student whose results fall
into the main cluster’, pp. 6–7). For example, as regards the first
criterion (breadth and depth of subject knowledge . . .), at the
threshold level students will demonstrate ‘an appropriate knowledge’
while at the modal level they will demonstrate ‘an extensive know-
ledge’.

Student assessment

163

( breadth and depth of subject knowledge, including relevant contextual knowledge

and the demonstration of powers of textual analysis as appropriate;

( the management of discursive analysis and argument, including the awareness of

alternative or contextualising lines of argument;

( rhetorical strategies which demonstrate the convincing deployment and evaluation

of evidence;

( independence of mind and originality of approach in interpretative and written

practice;

( ﬂuent and effective communication of ideas and sophistication of writing skills;

( critical acumen;

( informed engagement with scholarly debates.

(QAA, 2000: 6)

IGURE

6.2

Core assessment criteria.

While there is surely nothing objectionable about this list, on

reflection it is not easy to see how it could in fact enable teachers to
identify different assessment criteria to be applied, even at the various
levels of the programme let alone in all the component courses or
modules that might make it up. Rather, wouldn’t these very broad
criteria need to be met at every level, and in every course, to some
extent? The criteria might be weighted differently at different levels:
we might not attach as much value to ‘independence of mind and
originality . . .’ at Level 1 as at Level 3, for example, and in the final
year this criterion might be assessed especially in a dedicated project
or dissertation course. And the standards applied would certainly
differ from level to level – for example, the breadth and depth of
knowledge, the degree of sophistication of writing and of engagement
with scholarly debate expected at Level 3 would not be the same as
that expected at Level 1. Nonetheless, these are indeed all characteris-
tics of the study of Literature tout court.

So, it looks unlikely that core criteria of assessment in Literature can

be carved up and served at discrete levels, and in particular courses,
in the way recommended. Students begin to develop all the attributes
in the list from the start of their undergraduate studies (and often well
before), and through all the courses they study. True, some courses
may to a greater extent aim to deepen the students’ knowledge and
others to broaden it, and this emphasis will be reflected in the syllabus
and the activities the students are asked to undertake. But such items
and activities will not be different in kind – as we shall see shortly in

Teaching & Learning English Literature

164

the discussion of assessment in our anonymous English department
(Appendices 3 and 4 on the book’s website). Curiously, the Benchmark
Statement’s more detailed lists of ‘Subject knowledge’ and ‘Subject-
specific skills’ discussed in Chapter 4 may actually be more helpful as
a basis for drawing up such core assessment criteria just because they
are more detailed. What is also interesting is that the skills in the third
list discussed there, the ‘Generic and graduate skills’ (of IT, time-
management and organisation, and ‘employability’) are nowhere to be
found in the QAA’s list of assessment criteria!

However, including these skills would raise another issue – that of

‘core’ and ‘optional’ programme elements. If the programme aims and
assessment criteria included the acquisition of certain IT skills, for
example, where might they be taught and assessed? Unless such an
element were present in every course in the programme, which might
be thought an overemphasis or simply be impracticable, these skills
would have to be taught in a dedicated course or in a few particular
courses – and this course, or all/some of these courses, would
presumably have to be made compulsory. If we were also to include
as criteria the other ‘generic’ skills the QAA urges us to include, how
many core, compulsory courses would be needed in the programme?
And if these were many, how could we continue to offer the students
choice by designating some courses optional?

Returning to the core assessment criteria, if ‘independence of mind

and originality . . .’, for example, is deemed a core criterion of
assessment, could it continue to be assessed mainly in an optional
dissertation course? As regards the last two QAA assessment criteria
(‘critical acumen’ and ‘informed engagement with scholarly debates’),
would literary theory/criticism courses need to be made compulsory
in all institutions? And the problem would only be compounded if
very many more subject-specific aims were identified. A solution
might be differential weighting of programme aims and assessment
criteria, with some regarded as more important than others . . .? In any
event, it seems likely that such a system would create as many
problems as it seeks to solve.

So, if the core criteria of assessment we are offered are not after all

precise, do not enable us to assess different criteria among our courses,
have the effect of complicating our existing procedures and present us
with difficulties regarding the exercise of student choice, then what,
we may reasonably ask, is the point of these criteria?

Student assessment

165

Criterion- versus norm-referenced assessment

We have seen that assessing students on the basis of agreed criteria
(that is, criterion-referenced assessment) is said to have certain
advantages – clarity, consistent application of assessment criteria and
standards, reliable marking and transparency. In this kind of assess-
ment system the aim is to measure the students’ learning through a
process that is precise, objective and reliable. Norm-referenced assess-
ment, by contrast, is an art rather than a science – a kind of
connoisseurship in which experienced teachers in a particular disci-
pline acquire a shared understanding of both what they should be
assessing and the standards that should be applied. Through their
induction into the discipline, and their experience as a teacher of it,
they absorb the norms; they learn to make judgements appropriately
between levels and within particular courses of study. Clearly, then,
the Benchmark Statement’s lists of assessment criteria and threshold
and modal standards is an attempt at criterion-referenced assessment
which, as such, aims to make assessment in English a more objective,
‘scientific’ business.

Against this, we argued just now that the criteria identified there

seem unlikely to help us much, because they are broad rather than
precise and because they will apply to some extent to any and all the
courses that might make up the Literature programme. However,
perhaps that won’t matter too much if we can identify the precise
standards that apply to the programme. We saw, for instance, that an
‘appropriate’ breadth and depth of subject knowledge should be
demonstrated at the threshold level and an ‘extensive’ knowledge at
the modal level. But what is meant by ‘appropriate’ knowledge and
‘extensive’ knowledge’? What exactly is the difference between them?
We are not told. And we are not told because these are the kinds of
descriptor that only those on the inside of the discipline can interpret;
they belong in a norm-referenced assessment system. What this
suggests is that ‘rational’ practices are cloaking continued reliance on
what are after all socio-academic judgements. It implies that this
attempt to introduce a criterion-referenced assessment system is more
symbolic than real (Woolf, 2001). What are we to make of that?

Our answer would be that to the extent that the criterion-referenced

approach to assessment can make it a more consistent, reliable and
transparent process for teachers and students, it is a good thing to
attempt. In principle, teachers should know as clearly as possible

Teaching & Learning English Literature

166

against what criteria they are assessing students and what standards
they are applying. And these things should be agreed among all those
involved in teaching the programme so that they may apply the
criteria as consistently as possible and mark or grade as reliably as
possible. The fact that ultimately our judgements are indeed norm-
based makes it even more necessary that we undertake to reach
agreement about what those norms are. Group grading exercises, in
which team members mark the same assignment and exam answers,
and subsequently discuss their thinking and judgements, can be
powerfully effective towards reaching greater understanding and
consensus among the team – and also in training newcomers to
teaching, including graduate assistants.

Also, because norms are not of themselves transparent, teachers

should make their criteria and standards as transparent to students as
they can, describing what is required to gain particular marks, grades
and degree classifications, so that students understand both what they
are aiming for and why their present work attracts a particular grade.
Appendix 6(a) on the book’s website provides an example of assess-
ment criteria and standards for seminar presentations in a form that is
presented to the students (preceded by a description of the role of the
seminars in the course as whole). Note that grading criteria are
presented in positive terms of what is required of students at each
grade, and not in terms of ‘deficit’ from the top grade down – of what
students fail to do or demonstrate at the lower grades. In addition, we
should offer the students discussion sessions in which all these things
are explained and explored. They too will benefit greatly from
exercises in which the peer group grades anonymous scripts and
together discusses the outcomes.

Nonetheless, we would say that the extent to which the criterion-

referenced system can make assessment in English more ‘scientific’ is
soon reached – beyond that, as we saw, matters are likely to become
so complex and subtle as to undermine that system’s very aims of
validity, consistency and reliability. And that is because of the nature
of Literature as a discipline. In a discipline that is hermeneutic,
intertextual, participatory, value-laden, context-dependent and rela-
tively indeterminate (Chapter 1) – involving critical engagement,
insisting on problematising and also on creativity – it is simply not
possible (even if it were desirable) to predetermine all the outcomes of
the students’ learning, at the programme or any other level. This is
‘complex learning’ (Knight, 2001) which cannot be assessed by means

Student assessment

167

of ‘tame’ tasks that are structured and simplified such that little
challenge is involved. Nor is it possible to replace the teacher-
assessor’s judgements with ‘objective’ standards. And it appears that
the academics who compiled the English benchmark assessment
criteria understand all this very well.

In summary, what we would say is that as Literature teachers we

should aim to devise assessment regimes in which our criteria and
standards are as clear and precise as we can make them, while
retaining the proper scope for exercise of our professional judgement.
We turn now to some of the main considerations involved in the
design of such a regime.

ESIGNING AN ASSESSMENT REGIME

Learning versus measurement

Perhaps the most helpful distinction made in the Benchmark State-
ment is between formative assessment (designed primarily to contrib-
ute to the students’ learning throughout the programme of study) and
summative assessment (designed primarily to judge the results of their
learning). In practice the two modes are not mutually exclusive –
assessment regimes almost always include assignments that have both
functions simultaneously – nevertheless it is crucial that we under-
stand these essentially different purposes and are fully aware of the
implications of employing one, the other or both modes together.

These days, many literature programmes aim to achieve a balance

between formative and summative assessment (broadly, between
coursework and end-of-course exam), or may even place greater
emphasis on coursework. However, according to Gibbs and Simpson
(2004–5: 3–4, emphasis added),

this practice seems to run counter to

certain structural forces at work on and in higher education.

When teaching in higher education hits the headlines it is nearly always
about assessment: about examples of supposedly falling standards, about
plagiarism, about unreliable marking or rogue external examiners, about
errors in exam papers, and so on. The recent approach of the Quality
Assurance Agency (QAA) to improve quality in higher education has
been to focus on learning outcomes and their assessment, on the
specification of standards and on the role of external examiners to assure
these standards. Where institutional learning and teaching strategies

Teaching & Learning English Literature

168

focus on assessment they are nearly always about aligning learning
outcomes with assessment and about specifying assessment criteria. All
of this focus, of the media, of quality assurance and of institutions, is on
assessment as measurement.

But, the authors add:

The most reliable, rigorous and cheat-proof assessment systems are often
accompanied by dull and lifeless learning that has short-lasting outcomes
– indeed they often directly lead to such learning.

They conclude that, while they are not arguing for unreliable assess-
ment, ‘we should design assessment, first, to support worthwhile
learning, and worry about reliability later. Standards will be raised by
improving student learning rather than by better measurement of limited
learning.’ (Discuss.)

Coursework versus exams

Non-assessed coursework is clearly of the formative kind referred to
in the Benchmark Statement – perhaps the paradigm case of it –
having the sole purpose of focusing students’ attention and, through
judicious feedback from teachers, helping them to understand the
central ideas and engage in the processes involved in their studies.
Although all these matters will undoubtedly be assessed formally at
some points, the problem is that in the meantime the very absence of
assessment may ‘signal’ relative lack of importance; ironically, stu-
dents may pass up such opportunities for stress-free practice and
guidance. Put baldly, ‘students will rarely write unassessed essays’
(Gibbs and Simpson, 2004–5: 8). However, the authors continue, ‘if
coursework is taken away from a module due to resource constraints,
students simply do not do the associated studying . . . It is argued that
[teachers] have to assess everything in order to capture students’ time
and energy.’ This is an argument they do not support. Describing
some research conducted in the 1990s, in which teacher marking of
coursework was replaced by peer review, they note that:

. . . the students’ exam marks increased dramatically to a level well above
that achieved previously when teachers did the marking. What achieved
the learning was the quality of student engagement in learning tasks,

Student assessment

169

not teachers doing a lot of marking. The trick when designing assessment
regimes is to generate engagement with learning tasks without
generating piles of marking.

This is all the more important as student numbers increase because,
unlike the costs of teaching – which can be kept fairly steady, mainly
by increasing class sizes – the costs of assessment tend to rise in direct
proportion to student numbers, as does the burden of marking on
teachers. So, how can literature teachers engage their students in this
way without unduly burdening themselves?

First, if we want to try to make sure that students pay attention to

what we regard as important developmental activities it may be that
we have to abandon the widespread practice of assessing their
progress only at seminal points – on completion of major pieces of
work, such as full-blown essays – and find ways of encouraging
serious engagement in activities leading up to those points. For
example, in ‘The Patchwork Text’ project (www.apu.ac.uk), an essay
is built up over a number of weeks from a variety of sources and,
during this period, aspects of it are discussed with fellow students and
teachers in scheduled meetings. Some time may be devoted to such
activity in writing workshop sessions too, before the final product is
submitted. And we might even decide to award a percentage of the
total coursework marks to developmental activities. For instance,
Appendix 6(b) on the book’s website ties a class presentation, marked
at the time of delivery, to preparation of a coursework essay that is
marked at a later point. Or, two-stage assignments may be set with some
marks reserved for the first, draft stage – also on the assumption that
prevention of poor performance is better (for the students’ learning
and morale) than later, more time-consuming correction of it. Further,
this clearly signals writing as a means of understanding, not just a
result of it. And this kind of assignment (like the Patchwork Text) also
has the effect of distributing students’ efforts more evenly across the
weeks of study.

But the two-stage strategy would generate a rather heavier marking

load – unless it were designed as a group assignment, which could be
more efficient in terms of the time spent both teaching and marking.
Appendix 6(a) ‘Procedure’ on the book’s website outlines a three-stage
strategy in which small groups of students: (a) collaborate to produce
pieces of writing; (b) deliver them orally; and (c) subsequently together
prepare an analytical commentary and a self-assessment.

Teaching & Learning English Literature

170

Or we may try to ensure students’ engagement by other means, such

as the approach taken to attendance at seminars in the English
department whose course outlines are included in Appendix 3. There,
seminar attendance is clearly regarded as a major part of the students’
education in literature; although attendance itself does not attract
marks, nevertheless it is not optional.

Seminar attendance

Attendance at seminars is compulsory. There are several reasons for this. Student
absences may: compromise the assessment of, and adversely affect the learning
of, other students; disrupt the planned delivery of the seminar (which is
essentially participatory and collaborative in nature); disadvantage the absentee
by missing essential parts of the module; jeopardise the successful assessment of
the absentee. Therefore, students who do not attend at least 75% of
seminars on a module will be deemed to have failed that module (even if
a mark of 40% or higher is attained overall through formal assessment),
unless there are clear mitigating circumstances supported by
documentary evidence. Students who fail a module because of poor
attendance will normally be required to be entirely reassessed in that
module.

Please note that the attendance of individual students will be very carefully

monitored. Ensure that you sign an attendance register for each seminar
attended. If, for whatever reason, you are unable to attend a seminar, it is
important that you contact me (before the seminar, if possible) to inform me of
your situation, and to discuss the details of any work which may need to be
done as a result.

Out of courtesy to other members of the class, please be punctual.

Note that the assessment policy is made explicit (‘transparent’) in the
way the Benchmark Statement advocates; students are not only told
what the policy is but are also given reasons for it. A sanction for
non-attendance is then spelt out clearly.

Second, if a main aim of assessing students’ work is developmental

then we may also need to think in terms of less monolithic assessment
regimes. In many UK literature programmes the regime involves a
combination of assessed coursework (mainly essays) and unseen
examinations each usually of two or three hours’ duration in which
students are asked to write several essays – though in modular
systems both the duration and requirements of the exam and the
number of coursework essays are scaled down.

Student assessment

171

Unit title: Introduction to Prose Fiction, Level 1

Assessment design: diagnostic essay (0 per cent); 2,000-word essay (50 per cent);
two-hour (unseen) examination (50 per cent).

This course focuses on texts from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The exam is designed to assess breadth of subject knowledge. Students may not repeat
material used in the assessed essay, and they may not focus on a single text in answer
to a question.

Unit title: Critical Theory and Practice, Level 3

Assessment design: 3,000-word written assignment (50 per cent); two-hour
examination (50 per cent).

In the written assignment students must demonstrate understanding of the signiﬁcant
aspects of a particular critical theory and also critically evaluate that theory.

In the exam, students are asked to put theory into practice. The paper is divided into

two sections, each carrying equal weighting. In section 1 the candidate must answer a
general question (from a choice of ﬁve), demonstrating the ability to think critically
about an issue in relation to literary examples. In section 2 s/he must produce a critical
analysis of a literary extract provided in the examination paper (from a choice of three).

(www.english.heacademy.ac.uk, accessed August 2004)

IGURE

6.3

Examples of assessment design.

Practice varies with respect to the proportion of the overall marks

awarded to coursework and exams, but it is still fairly unusual for
coursework to be weighted more heavily (and see the example
assessments in Figure 6.3). In this respect, practice in our anonymous
English department is what some would term ‘progressive’ – here, the
emphasis is on coursework, which also includes an oral component. In
each module a 1,500-word essay attracts 40 per cent of the total marks
and an oral presentation a further 30 per cent; the remaining 30 per
cent of marks is awarded to one essay produced in a summative,
end-of-module unseen examination. (However, in all three assessment
components the pass mark is 40 per cent, which is the standard
commonly applied in the UK.)

As regards coursework essays, note that submission is about

three-quarters of the way through each module – as explained in
Appendix 3(c), ‘so that you can profit from the marking of your essay
before revising for your exam’. So, although perhaps a little late in the
day for a formative assignment, this work clearly has that function –
as does the oral presentation, which may be assessed at any point in

Teaching & Learning English Literature

172

the semester. We may suspect that students who happen to make their
presentation earlier rather than later on perhaps derive greater benefit.
But that also depends upon what feedback they receive from the
teacher and how it is viewed, matters to which we will return.

Progression in assessment

Meantime, we can also see from these course outlines that, although
the assessment model is the same across the programme (70 per cent
coursework; 30 per cent exam), progression from one level to the next
is built in. At Level 1, for example, the coursework essay questions/
titles are tightly focused, on specific texts that have been studied in the
module and (although students are clearly expected to have contextual
knowledge) they are quite narrow in scope, for example: ‘Choosing
two poems of the First World War that we have studied, assess, in
detail, their particular contribution to the writing of the period.’
Contrast that with the Level 2 question, ‘How effectively does
Browning present different kinds of obsession in his poetry?’ Here
there is no indication of such restriction, but whether the students
select poems appropriately is no doubt itself an aspect of the test. At
Level 3 the questions are at once broad and more abstract: ‘Analyse
the relationship between repression and biology as presented in
Atwood’; ‘What part do gender and sex play in the struggle for utopia
as constructed by Lessing?’ Note, too, that at Level 3 the students are
offered greater choice in that they may if they wish negotiate with the
teacher an essay question/title other than those listed.

Similarly, progression is evident in the examination papers set at

Levels 2 and 3 (see Appendix 4(a) and (b) on the book’s website). The
Level 2 exam offers students a wide choice – in fact, the first eight
questions cover the syllabus – and these questions are quite circum-
scribed, for example: ‘Tess has been described as a striking embodi-
ment ‘‘of the woman realised both as object and as consciousness’’.
Consider the validity of this statement, with close reference to the text.’
The last few questions are broader in scope, offering the possibility for
comparisons and contrasts to be drawn, but within specified limits:
‘Explore the representation of childhood in at least two Victorian
novels.’ At Level 3, by contrast, the questions are thematic and
open-ended, with the rubric including the instruction always to refer
to two or more texts (which the students know must extend beyond
the relatively few ‘set’ texts): ‘In what variety of ways, and for what

Student assessment

173

reasons, do the writers of utopias challenge or extend notions of
reality?’; ‘How far do the dystopian texts you have read represent an
attack on idealism?’

Notice, too, that it is clear from the rubric under ‘Assessment’ in

Appendix 3(b) that it is possible for the students to achieve less than
40 per cent for their performance in any one of the assessed
components (coursework essay, oral presentation, exam) and still pass
the module as a whole if they attain 40 per cent overall; an overall
mark of 40 per cent will not do – the students must also achieve at
least 40 per cent in two of the three components. What this means is
that the examination is not privileged in any way, which is quite
unusual (especially in a regime in which an exam attracts only 30 per
cent of the total marks). It suggests that, in this regime, the exam is not
seen as particularly significant in educational terms. Rather, a main
purpose is likely to be verification – to ensure that the work is
undertaken by the named student and (especially in the distance
teaching context) that the student is who she says she is. So, various
forms of cheating are made more difficult and, subsequently, any very
marked discrepancy between performance in coursework and exam
can be investigated.

Furthermore, exams are regarded as an important guarantee of

academic standards. In UK universities, for example, they are nor-
mally blind double-marked, and the exam papers, the distribution of
grades awarded and cases at the boundaries between grades are
subject to scrutiny by an external examiner – a colleague of standing
in the discipline from a different institution. These strategies are
designed to assure high standards within Literature departments and
also comparable standards in departments across the country. By
contrast, coursework is not normally double-marked (except for
dissertations), and only if there is a discrepancy between it and the
exam mark will it be scrutinised by an exam board including the
external examiner. Exam boards are expensive to convene; in general,
having one programme board and a system with fewer assessment
boundary points (a pass/fail or a class awards system, e.g. first,
second, third) rather than the scale 0–100 per cent make for easier
decisions, less scope for disagreement between markers and fewer
cases at the boundaries that need to be reviewed.

Although verification and assurance of standards are functions of

exams generally, in many assessment regimes exams are indeed also
justified on educational grounds. They are thought to have the

Teaching & Learning English Literature

174

Students prefer coursework – they consider it to be fairer, to measure a greater range
of abilities and allow them more scope to organise their own work patterns.

Students do better at coursework assignments – all combinations of kinds of
coursework produce up to 12 per cent higher average marks than exams alone: in
English, one-third of a degree classiﬁcation higher; three times as many students fail
exam-only modules.

Coursework is valid – coursework marks are a better predictor than exam scores of
long-term learning of course content and of any subsequent performance (e.g. success
at work).

The quality of students’ learning is higher in assignment-based courses – including
greater emphasis on thinking, more sophisticated conceptions of learning, greater
ability to make comparisons and to evaluate.

Whether or not higher education teachers give helpful feedback on coursework
assignments makes more difference than anything else they do – ‘helpful’ feedback
focuses students’ attention on important aspects of the subject, helps them monitor
their own progress, encourages active learning, provides understanding of results,
helps the students feel a sense of accomplishment and aids student retention.

Adapted from Gibbs and Simpson (2004–5).

IGURE

6.4

What do we know about coursework assessment versus
exams?

particular and distinct merits of prompting students to revise the
course, reviewing their work and pulling together their knowledge of
it from all sources, a process that has the effect of considerably
increasing their understanding. Some would also justify the unseen
nature of exams as giving students practice at working under pressure,
memorising and having to ‘think on their feet’, supposedly real-world
abilities that will be valued in the workplace. In Literature pro-
grammes, however, the burden of pure memorising is sometimes
relieved by means of ‘open-book’ exams, in which students can bring
along (un-annotated) set texts. It is claimed that, given the time-limit
of the exam, this is no substitute for the kind of knowledge and
understanding gained through the revision process, that, in fact,
students will do less well in the exam if they waste time consulting the
texts for more than the precise wordings of quotations. However this
may be, exams are not on the whole popular with students (see Figure
6.4).

Yet, according to Gibbs and Simpson (pp. 8–9), in general

coursework assessment is in decline in the UK: owing to resource

Student assessment

175

constraints, assignments are set less frequently and the amount,
quality and timeliness of feedback offered to students is reduced –
especially in shorter, modular courses. Indeed, as we saw in the
anonymous English department, only one assignment per module is
set and that towards the end of each semester, not long before the
exam. Modularisation and semesterisation have generally also led to
an increase in the number of examinations. And a great increase in the
use of graduate assistants (mainly a consequence of the now intense
focus on research and research funding through the Research Assess-
ment Exercise) may, they argue, have an adverse effect on the quality
of the feedback students are offered. The authors conclude (p. 9,
emphasis added):

At the same time the diversity of students has increased enormously, so
that previous assumptions of the level of sophistication of knowledge
background, study skills, conception of learning (Säljö, 1982) or
conception of knowledge (Perry, 1970) of students are now likely to be
very wide of the mark. Far more guidance is likely to be required by
these students, who need more practice at tackling assignments
and more feedback on their learning, not less.

EEDBACK AND LEARNING

If we do not care much whether the students learn or whether they
abandon their studies, then the best thing we can do is give their
coursework assignments low marks and provide no comment at all,
especially in the early stages of higher education. But if we want
coursework assessment to help our students learn, then offering them
feedback on their work is of the essence.

Matters are as clear cut as

that.

However, it is also clear that we must try to think about these

matters in the present circumstances of institutions. For example, in an
effort to retain coursework the argument that it increases student
retention is likely to be a strong one – retaining students is, after all, a
lot cheaper than losing them and having to recruit afresh. And any
ideas we may have about the frequency and quantity of feedback that
should ideally be offered must be tempered by the knowledge that in
most institutions teachers have even less time to give to this aspect of
their job than before. That said, we know that there are several

Teaching & Learning English Literature

176

principles involved in providing feedback that should be adhered to –
which are also conditions of the students’ making good use of the
feedback offered.

Set a formative assignment and offer feedback on it as early in a
course as possible. This is good for the students’ development,
since they will have time in the course to learn from it, and it is
good for their morale, and for retention, if they receive guidance
and support early on – particularly at Level 1. The feedback
should of course be encouraging rather than very critical at that
early stage; from the students’ perspective, it is a long-term project
they’re embarking on.

Provide feedback as quickly as possible. Certainly students should
receive feedback on an assignment before they get started on the
next, or well before they sit an exam, otherwise it’s of little use to
their development.

In feedback, focus on the students’ performance of the task rather
than on them or their abilities as individuals, and comment
constructively. It is hard for students (indeed, for anyone) to
receive critical comment calmly, fully take it in and use it well.
But that is exactly what we want them to do. Lea and Street (1998:
169) remark on teachers’ frequent use of ‘ ‘‘categorical modality’’,
using imperatives and assertions, with little mitigation or qualifi-
cation . . . as a categorical assertion that the point is not ‘‘correct’’ ’
(‘Explain’, ‘A bit confused’, ‘?’, ‘!’). Here, the teacher ‘clearly and
firmly takes authority, assumes the right to criticise directly . . . on
the basis of an assumed ‘‘correct’’ view of what should have been
written and how’. They argue that use of a more provisional
modality, such as ‘you might like to consider . . .’, ‘have you
thought about . . .?’ or ‘could this be interpreted differently?’
would ‘evoke a different interpersonal relationship between
student as writer and teacher as marker . . .’

Provide feedback in such a way that the students can understand it
given their current level of sophistication, as we have just seen.
Also, offer advice that is specific and doable. ‘Avoid ambiguity by
eliminating pronouns that have no clear referent and by moving or
eliminating misplaced modifiers or dangling phrases’ will leave
students gaping. ‘Read the literature on X’ is not very helpful; ‘read
A’s article on X’ is much more so. ‘Use evidence appropriately’ is
no doubt something the students would do if only they knew how.

Student assessment

177

Offer feedback selectively, not copiously. There is only so much
that a student can take in at a given time and hope to practise and
improve at. A focus on three or four issues is probably sufficient
with respect to any one assignment.

Offer feedback that looks forward to the next and subsequent
tasks (not simply corrects the present performance) so that it will
help towards the students’ future work. Indeed, Knight (forth-
coming) argues that such ‘feed forward’ is more valuable than
feedback because it has greater power ‘to stimulate transfer’ from
one type of task to another and to improve future performance.

There are ways of putting some of these principles into practice that
will undoubtedly save the teacher’s time and effort. For example, to
take the last point: there will often be occasion to remark on the
students’ writing or aspects of their study skills that are of ongoing
importance. So, commenting on these things is worth investing time in.
Furthermore, they may be things that many students get wrong or
could do with some advice about. In this case it will be worth preparing
comments fairly carefully and fully which may then be circulated to all
the students, on paper or posted on the course website. Such a practice
could extend to substantive matters too; often students will misunder-
stand the same aspect of an essay question, or choose similarly to focus
on a rather peripheral matter at the expense of something more
important. It may well be a more efficient use of the teacher’s time also
to prepare this kind of feedback for all, adding just a few further points
on each individual student’s script. Over time, a bank of comments
could be compiled and used in successive presentations of the course.

Also, it is less time-consuming to direct students to some explana-

tory source material when possible rather than explain something fully
oneself, which has the added advantage that the students can then
work out for themselves where they may have gone wrong. In the case
of a very poor essay, it may be best to mark only the first page or so
in any detail and then return it for correction and resubmission; this
strategy both saves the teacher time and forces the student to think
about how to do better. And, finally, students are themselves a
constructive-critical resource – we shall see shortly the kind of
contribution that peer review of students’ work can make to their
development.

We have focused here on students’ written work. But where there is

an oral component of the course then the students will also need

Teaching & Learning English Literature

178

feedback on their performance of it. Here, we would recommend even
greater sensitivity to the students’ feelings, especially when critical
comment is made person to person. Such comment may feel like an
attack on the very person – to a much greater extent than critique of
written work – because a presentation is more directly self-expressive:
nobody enjoys hearing that they bored everyone silly or simply failed
to communicate with their classmates. Feedback on an oral presenta-
tion can be attended and reacted to in privacy if it is presented in
written form after the fact.

Plagiarism

We raise plagiarism as an issue in its own right because it undermines
the educational purposes of coursework; to the extent that if students
plagiarise they fail to address for themselves literary ideas and study
processes. In this time of Internet plagiarism, with lurid stories of
coursework downloaded, essays bought and sold, it may seem naïve
to point out that many students are confused by the meaning of
‘plagiarism’. But in their study of student writing, Lea and Street
(1998: 167–8) found that students ‘expressed anxieties about plagiar-
ism in terms of their own authority as writers . . . Their overriding
concern was that the texts they read were authoritative and that they
as students had little useful to say.’ They cite a student: ‘I don’t know
anything about the subject other than what I’ve read in books so how
on earth could I write anything which was not someone else’s idea?’
They continue, ‘For this student, as with others, the relationship
between plagiarism and correct referencing was not transparent and
he was worried that he would plagiarise unknowingly.’ However, the
institution treated plagiarism ‘as clearly definitive and unquestion-
able’. Its discourse ‘is that of the law and authority rather than of tutor
and student engaged in the learning practices of educational dis-
course’, which ‘affirms the disciplinary and surveillance aspects of the
writing process . . . backed by the heavy weight of an institution with
boards, regulations and, ultimately, legal resources’. Although univer-
sities and departments must both define the meaning of plagiarism
and make their policy regarding it widely known, Lea and Street’s
research suggests that a more sensitive approach to these matters is
required of teachers in the interests of their students’ learning.

That said, institutions and teachers cannot take a relaxed attitude to

the trade in student work on the Internet. But this and less wholesale

Student assessment

179

cheating can be very difficult to detect since material from electronic
sources can so easily be cut and pasted into assignments, and there are
very many sources available. Furthermore, the plagiarised essays are
student essays – good ones perhaps, but not the polished products of
critics, extracts from which teachers may recognise and are anyway
much more likely to spot. However, that same Internet hosts a number
of plagiarism detection services, some of them programmes developed
by universities (see www.jisc.ac.uk/mle/plagiarism). Other than our
own noses, this is indeed the main line of defence.

The role of teacher and assessor

Policing our students in this way is not an appealing prospect, and it
raises a broad issue touched on in earlier chapters – that we may
experience considerable tension between the role of nurturing teacher
and that of judge and assessor of the students’ work. In the former role we
are fully involved with our students, guiding their learning and attending
to their development as students of Literature; in the latter role, it seems
we must stand back from them, as it were ‘forget’ all that and judge the
work they produce according to the agreed criteria and standards.

Indeed, post-Foucault we cannot be unthinking about the forces that

act upon our institutions and the power relations that permeate them.
Jones et al. (2005) suggest that the role of teacher itself contains such
tension. Teaching, they argue, has a double function – of conveying ideas
and managing communication – and these ‘ideational’ and ‘interper-
sonal’ functions may conflict. Exploring in some detail the workings of
first- and second-year text-based seminar classes, they observe that in
ideational terms ‘the skirmishes tend to take place between certain kinds
of language – academic versus non-academic’, with teachers acting as
exemplars of literary discourse, carrying out both ‘modelling’ work and
‘reframing’ work. This they acknowledge involves a kind of ‘coercion’ or
‘authority-backed persuasion’. In the first-year class the teacher was seen
to downplay ideational conflict (e.g. did not insist on historicising the
text) in order to establish fruitful interpersonal relationships with and
among the students; in the second-year class, where ‘the language is held
more in common’, there was much more ideational cut and thrust. These
authors conclude that the coercive element

seems to us an important part of the teacher’s role. Even though it is
complicated and perhaps compromised by other roles . . . it is not one

Teaching & Learning English Literature

180

which can in any facile way be counterpoised to a teaching style based
on the recognition of difference, or the encouragement of subaltern voices
. . . The teachers are doing necessary work – raising the students’
capacities to read, reason, argue, write, and so on . . . But [although this
is so], students’ willingness to enter into the process is provisional.
Lecturers have to earn the right to teach, so to speak, on the basis
of the intellectual productivity of their relationship with students.

(Emphasis added)

Given the power that teachers inevitably have – an authority on the
discipline and (backed by institutional might) an authority over the
student – it seems that they have to earn the students’ trust if they
want to foster serious engagement with the subject. Perhaps this is a
solution to the conflict between the roles of teacher and assessor too.
Perhaps it is less a matter of the teacher somehow overcoming such
conflict and more a matter of students ‘granting’ the role of assessor,
‘agreeing’ to overlook its threatening aspect. The authors suggest that
this will happen only if the students feel their teacher is trustworthy
in the teaching role – genuinely has their interests at heart. Further, in
the role of assessor, we can surely earn that trust only by sincerely
trying to make our assessment practices as valid, reliable and
transparent as possible.

Specialisation versus multidisciplinarity revisited

In Chapter 4 we noted that students in a combined/joint honours or
modular programme, of which only a part is devoted to Literature, are
‘rarely taught or assessed separately from their peers in single honours
at the level of course or module’, and questioned whether these
students could indeed possibly be expected to acquire the same
breadth and depth of knowledge given that they spend half the time
or less studying Literature than their specialist peers. We also
questioned whether these students’ knowledge and understanding
would be similar in kind to the specialist literature student’s. We
asked, ‘should we apply the same criteria of judgement to these
students’ achievements?’ – and answered, ‘No’. We speculated there
that different assessment criteria might be identified or different
standards of achievement applied. However, since we concluded
earlier that assessment criteria in Literature are likely to be broad and
relatively indeterminate, applicable in any and all courses, it seems

Student assessment

181

more likely that we could achieve this discrimination by applying
standards differentially. Once the various assessment criteria have
been agreed upon, the standards expected of specialist Literature
students might first be stipulated. Then it would be a matter of
qualifying those standards where appropriate for application to
multidisciplinary students. For example, different degrees of ‘breadth’
and ‘depth’ of knowledge may well be identified; these students might
perhaps be expected to have greater contextual knowledge than
Literature specialists, but less experience of in-depth textual analysis.
We invite you to think further about this in an Activity at the end of
the chapter.

ARIOUS FORMS OF ASSESSMENT

As we saw, the English Benchmark Statement assumes that a variety
of approaches will be taken to assessment. We would just reiterate
here what we concluded about diversity in teaching methods in
Chapter 5: the point is not to hold fast only to the traditional methods
we are familiar and comfortable with (the essay, the exam, the project/
dissertation . . .) nor to offer variety for variety’s sake, but to know why
we use the methods of assessment that we do, when and to achieve what.
For example, in many subjects multiple choice testing is used, and
increasingly so now that the tests can be marked by computer (see the
national Computer Assisted Assessment Centre, University of Luton:
www.caacentre.ac.uk). Computer-marked testing (CMT) could per-
haps replace essay-based exams in Literature and so considerably save
teachers’ time and effort. So, should English teachers use CMT?

First we must ask: why use it? What aspects of our students’

knowledge, understanding and/or skill would it enable them to
demonstrate? How would using it impact on their understanding of
Literature as a discipline and their study practices? The UK Subject
Centre for English is currently experimenting with this form of
assessment

– testing students’ knowledge of texts (displaying literary

extracts or entire poems followed by multiple choice or yes/no
options), their awareness of literary techniques, knowledge of literary
history and basic critical terms – for diagnostic purposes, or in
formative or summative mode. Either way, and even though such tests
are tricky and time-consuming to construct, the scores make up ‘only a
fraction of a student’s overall degree’ and thus ‘threaten in no way the

Teaching & Learning English Literature

182

hegemony of the essay as the focus of assessment in English studies’.
The authors continue:

The terrible literalness of computers means that, in general, questions
have to deal in matters of right and wrong in a way that is perhaps alien
to thinking about and discussing literature. The reduction of critical
subtleties to ‘yes’ or ‘no’ may indeed be offensive in itself. On the other
hand, if we want students to read texts and remember something about
them, why not test their knowledge?

You will of course have to answer our questions, and theirs, for
yourself.

Leaving aside the staple forms of assessment and also oral assess-

ment, then, about which enough has probably been said, what other
methods might we consider using because they promote our students’
learning and/or enable us to judge their knowledge and skill
appropriately?

Group work

We have seen that collaborative group work is highly valued in a
discursive subject such as Literature as a means of encouraging
cooperative research, the pooling of ideas and knowledge among
peers, and also offering them opportunities to discuss texts and debate
aspects of the subject together in a focused, task-oriented way. More
generally, confident, articulate expression of ideas is at the centre not
only of our research and teaching but also of our students’ ability to
progress in the discipline.

However, as we noted earlier, difficulties

can arise in assessing group work fairly especially as regards variable
inputs to the work by individual students – notably, those who see it
as a licence to take things easy. A number of strategies have been
devised for coping with this, most of which depend on some
combination of a whole-group mark for the finished product –
whether written work or oral/visual presentation or both – plus
assessment of individually prepared work (see Appendix 6(a) under
‘Procedure’). For example, the group members may be required to
keep a log or build up a portfolio of their research notes and various
contributions to the project from start to finish, which is marked
separately from the group product (for which each member gains the
same, threshold, score); the group score and individual score are then
summed to yield a probably different final score for each group

Student assessment

183

member. Or the mark awarded to each group member may be
negotiated openly and agreed by the whole group in discussion with
the tutor. Individually prepared work may also take the form of an
account of the development of the work, a critique of the outcome or
a self-assessment (see below).

A difficulty that arises with regard to group presentations towards

summative assessment concerns verifiability. Short of audio or video
recording the presentations and subjecting them to double marking at
a later date, the only guarantee is when written work is submitted in
support of the presentation – another reason why it is so often
required. Finally, a tendency has been noted among students to spend
longer at work on group projects (especially preparing for presenta-
tions) than the marks available warrant. No doubt the desire not to let
fellow students down or a fear of being humiliated in front of them
can create a lot of anxiety. All these issues need to be aired in
Literature departments and also discussed with students.

Peer assessment

Peer assessment is almost exclusively used formatively and rarely
reduces the marking burden on teachers in any direct way. It is often
used, for example, precisely to help students understand the assess-
ment criteria and standards that apply to their work, especially in their
first year as undergraduates. These exercises usually take the form
referred to earlier, of each student independently marking the same
anonymous essays (of varying standards, produced by students in
previous intakes) against the stated criteria, and subsequently discuss-
ing their thoughts and judgements together and with a tutor. In
rounding up the discussion, the tutor can be sure to raise any
significant issues not covered in the discussion.

Generally, peer assessment is based on the belief that students have

much to learn from each other’s experience, knowledge and under-
standings. So it is also often used to help develop the students’ skills
as critics and writers, notably in writing workshops (as we saw in
Chapter 3). Here, the students may bring along an outline of an essay
or talk for critique by a partner or small group of fellow students. If
the work in preparation is posted on the course website beforehand,
the session itself can be used very productively. In the case of remote
students, ‘discussion’ and critique can be accomplished via a dedi-
cated computer conference (see below).

Teaching & Learning English Literature

184

But peer assessment can also be used to help improve the students’

subject-specific learning, as the case in Appendix 6(c) demonstrates.
Notice that in this design the student’s performance as a peer assessor
is itself assessed by the tutor, on the basis of its potential to help the
fellow student whose work is under scrutiny. The exercise thus
includes an element of training in how to make judgements appro-
priately and equitably, and how to criticise in a constructive, un-
threatening manner – experiences that no doubt pay off in other
settings, such as the seminar. It underlines the obvious point that
students learn over time how to conduct themselves in the role of
assessor. If this form of assessment is to be used then opportunities to
learn must be included in the Literature programme. This should
counteract the possibility of prejudiced treatment of some students
(those from ethnic minorities, for example), especially at a time when
there is increasing pressure to make assessment fairer by making it
anonymous.

Self-assessment

We have just seen how self-assessment may be used, summatively, in
the context of collaborative group work. Here, as elsewhere, its use
emphasises the importance for the students’ progress in reflection on
their own performance, their developing understanding and skills.
Self-assessment invites students to put some critical distance between
the experience of carrying out their work and the finished product –
applying to that product the standards of judgement they would apply
to any other written material or oral performance. When they do so
sincerely, they may acquire deeper understanding of what is expected
of them as students and a surer grasp of their present strengths and
weaknesses.

Self-assessment aimed at improving students’ essay writing was a

focus of the ‘Assessment and The Expanded Text’ project (see note 3).
In this scheme, students are required to complete a self-assessment
sheet to accompany each essay they submit. The sheet

. . . provides students with a structured way of reflecting on, and
critically evaluating, their own written work. It breaks the essay down
into its constituent parts and invites students to assess their performance
in each . . . part. Accompanying [this] are explanations of what
constitutes stronger or weaker performance in that category . . . [using]

Student assessment

185

the common terminology of assessment (e.g. ‘persuasiveness’, ‘argu-
ment’, ‘originality’) . . . in well-defined language that is intelligible to
students. The sheet also provides space for them to make a general
comment on their work in their own words, and invites them to estimate
a percentage grade . . . tutors tick the boxes and make their own
comments on the essay. Thus they use the sheet as the main form of
written feedback . . . The sheet is accompanied by a short guide for
students on how to self-assess their work.

These materials are available for adaptation and use (www.unn.ac.uk/
assessingenglish).

Self-assessment may also take the more subject-centred form of a

‘personal statement’ in which the students critically review their own
position on a topic or text. The requirements for statements such as
this may be as rigorous as for any other piece of written work: as
carefully focused, clearly structured, referenced, etc. As we shall see,
such statements are often required as an accompaniment to and
overview of a portfolio of work.

Portfolios

Appendix 6(d) on the book’s website provides an example of portfolio
assessment. Here, the students bring together their coursework (three
essays), written and marked at intervals during the course, which they
resubmit at the end of the year along with a review of the seminars
they have attended and the contributions to them they have personally
made. This design, then, combines essay-assessment and self-assess-
ment. It also neatly avoids the main pitfall of portfolio assessment –
the extra burden of marking it usually entails for the teacher – by not
requiring any remarking of the essays in the portfolio; at the end of
the course the only marking needed is of the seminar review.
Nevertheless, at that stage teachers can review the sum total of the
students’ work in the course which, in this case, they may modify by
10 per cent up or down. Often, however, portfolios contain coursework
that was read by the tutor and, on the basis of the feedback provided,
is rewritten and resubmitted for grading at the end of the course.
Clearly, this is designed to enhance the students’ learning and no
doubt does, but (like the two-stage assignment discussed earlier) it
doubles the work for the tutor – unless, as we saw, the first stage is
peer- or group-assessed.

Teaching & Learning English Literature

186

There are looser and more creative uses of portfolio assessment too,

at the extreme to a kind of reflective ‘learning diary’ the students keep
throughout their courses. Some of these approaches are also
documented on the English Subject Centre website (www.english.
heacademy.ac.uk).

1. Level 2 course, ‘Texts and Textuality’

The portfolio [of 4,000 words] is intended to be a space where students record,
reﬂect on and select their coursework . . . They can rewrite seminar work so it’s
all one thing, or they can include lots of snippets and cut ups of their own work
. . . The portfolio provides them with the opportunity to apply principles to
things which interest them, rather than having a prescribed question to answer
. . . [It] includes copy of the exercises done for class. Students are encouraged to
edit these pieces in ways which show a development of learning . . . [Workshops
are used] to discuss and redraft work . . . Implicit in the workshop method is the
belief that by presenting their work in progress students are likely to increase
both their understanding of critique as a genre and develop skills of persuasion,
negotiation and argument which improve their essay writing.

2. Level 1 course, ‘The City, Real and Imagined’

The portfolio can assume many forms. It might be a scrapbook of materials
collected from media sources. It can include or be comprised substantially of
interviews on audio or video tape. It can include photographs taken by students
or photomontages. All of these forms have been presented to students in the
teaching sessions . . . Whatever form [it takes] . . . students must include a
written commentary that outlines the theme chosen and reﬂects on how the
themes relate to materials presented on the unit, as well as . . . in the course
reader . . . The extent to which [it does so] forms a crucial measure of the
portfolio’s success or failure in terms of marks out of 100. [It must also] show
evidence of wider research – in media archives or libraries.

. . . The portfolio is ﬂexible enough to let students take further any one of the

approaches introduced to them on the unit. The ﬂexibility of the assessment
makes it well suited to diverse classes including people from very different
backgrounds, abilities and with very different study proﬁles. The portfolio is also
researched and compiled across the semester, giving plenty of opportunity for
feedback, advice, tutorial sessions. Time is built into the programme for seminar
and workshop feedback and ﬁnal presentation of results.

Student assessment

187

Online discussion and group work

For remote students an asynchronous computer conference may be the
only means of ‘discussing’ ideas about the texts they read with other
students and their tutor: ‘discussing’ because, as we noted in Chapter
5, many of the features of face-to-face discussion are not possible in
this medium, particularly its spontaneous flow and cut-and-thrust.
However, from the point of view of student assessment the conference
has the distinct advantage of yielding a transcript. By its nature, live
seminar discussion cannot be captured in its entirety and subjected to
scrutiny after the event. The conference transcript, by contrast, not
only provides an accurate record of the event but also identifies each
of the ‘speakers’. Indeed, when a conference discussion is included in
the assessment design students are often required to make a certain
number of contributions, and of particular kinds: initiating a topic/
offering a point of view; ‘listening’ and responding to others’ points of
view; synthesising or summarising aspects of the discussion, and so
on. It is then a relatively easy matter to assess their various
contributions. And these (and any other) requirements may be
communicated to remote students in just the ways we saw earlier of
making the assessment regime transparent.

Via the Internet remote students can also engage in collaborative

group work. In dedicated spaces (which the tutor may observe) they
can work together on a project over a specified period, making use of
a range of online source material (in such an integrated medium,
including visual and aural sources) as well as primary texts in print.
In the virtual setting, just as in the real world, they must discuss the
issues, organise themselves, distribute tasks, negotiate the outcomes
and, together, structure and present the final piece of work. The main
difference is that time-scales for this kind of work (as for discussions)
are inevitably longer, allowing for remote access and students’
occupying different time zones. As before, not just the finished product
but also the workings of the group are evident and open to scrutiny.
Thus issues surrounding fair allocation of marks for the different
group members are somewhat less problematic.

Formative assessment and two-stage assignments may also be

accomplished online. For example, draft essays can be posted elec-
tronically and peer-reviewed prior to reworking and final submission.
Submission of assignments of all kinds is of course also electronic,
which can considerably speed up the process of marking and

Teaching & Learning English Literature

188

providing feedback to the students – something that is becoming
common in campus universities too, even where little reliance is made
on the web for other purposes. And use of html, for example, enables
students to include a wide variety of assignment formats and a range
of media.

Online scenario

Students studying a playwright are provided with set texts, readers and DVDs of
performances of the play(s). They also have access to a range of online resources
and engage in a number of online activities based around discussing certain
themes, in computer conference with the tutor and each other. At intervals
different ‘experts’ are brought in to the online forum to discuss particular issues,
with whom the students may also engage.

Assessment is based on a collaborative activity in which the students work

together, in groups of 4–5 over a ten-week period, to produce a proposal for
staging a play of their choice. An outline structure for the proposal is provided,
indicating what issues must be addressed; the word limit for the assignment is
3,000 and students are encouraged to include other media as appropriate. At
the mid-point, each small group must post a draft extract from their proposal on
the course website (text only, max. 700 words) for review and comment by the
tutor and other students. The tutor has access to the small-group discussions
throughout the period and may, on occasion, intervene to offer guidance. On
the due date, each group must post its ﬁnished proposal.

The virtual learning environment supports a range of media including audio,

video, text, images and stage simulations, a threaded discussion board and a
webcasting facility so that the experts can make their contribution from their
own locations. The students also have access to a range of collaborative tools,
such as shared whiteboards, instant messaging and annotation tools, that allow
them to share comments on text and visuals.

Or, students may work together on whole-group developmental tasks,
such as analysing a literary extract or summarising a critical text,
posting their critiques or summaries on the website and discussing
each other’s versions in a conference. Such formative activities also
help students build up the specifically online skills of discussion and
group working they need, along with the (usually not too demanding)
technical ability.

An example of the assessment design for an online course is

included in Appendix 6(e). Unlike the other designs there, this is not
a course in Literature. It is in fact a course in the UKOU’s Masters in
Open and Distance Education, first presented to 60 students world-

Student assessment

189

wide in 1998 and subject to ongoing updating and revision. The
students either plan to be or are already involved in the design and
delivery of online courses. Notice that the types of coursework
assessment included are various: seminar-type discussion subsequent-
ly incorporated in an essay; collaborative group work involving
research (web search); creative work (designing a multimedia pro-
gramme); and an extended essay encompassing all aspects of the
course. The course ends with an examinable component.

OSTSCRIPT

We have argued in the chapter that, in assessing students, teachers of
Literature should be aiming to devise regimes in which our criteria
and standards of assessment are as clear and precise as possible and
are applied consistently, without compromise to the exercise of our
professional judgement. In a complex, problematising and creative
discipline such as Literature, it is neither possible nor desirable to try
to determine all the outcomes of students’ learning in advance. We
may feel strongly that the essay continues to be the best way to offer
students the opportunity to argue a case at some length, and so both
learn and demonstrate their growing understanding and skill. But this
does not mean to say that teachers are unable to introduce other
methods of assessment, especially in the context of (formative)
coursework. We have seen that there are a number of possibilities
here. However, whatever the task, timely and constructive feedback to
students on their performance is vitally important for their learning. It
would be a shame if such trends as modularisation and semesterisa-
tion were allowed to reduce these opportunities. In conclusion, we
reiterate Gibbs and Simpson’s belief (2004–5: 4) that ‘standards will be
raised by improving student learning rather than by better measure-
ment of limited learning’.

Activity?

If you are setting out to design or reappraise an assessment regime, preferably
with a group of colleagues, we suggest that you take as your starting point the
Benchmark Statement’s short list of assessment criteria (this chapter) and the
longer lists of ‘Subject Knowledge’ and ‘Subject-speciﬁc skills’ (see Figures 4.2
and 4.4 in Chapter 4) and ‘Generic and graduate skills’ (Appendix 5 on the
book’s website).

Teaching & Learning English Literature

190

Try devising assessment criteria for your literature programme as a whole. And

then the standards required at two or three grades/degree classiﬁcations – ﬁrst
for specialist Literature students and, separately, for students in multidisciplinary
programmes.

Try deriving from this the assessment criteria and standards for at least one

course at each level of study. (If you carried out the activity at the end of Chapter
4 and re/designed a course or module, you might like to build on that work.) Will
any of the courses be compulsory or optional? Will any include online elements?

Finally, work out how you could make all this transparent to students. What

information will you need to give them, in what form(s)? And how will you try to
make sure that the students fully understand the information and its implications
for them?

Notes

1. Extensive reference is made to the Gibbs and Simpson article throughout the

discussion. Written as part of a report of a large-scale project funded by the
Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), it provides a review
of the literature – including significant contributions made in the 1970s on both
sides of the Atlantic, by such as Snyder (1971) on the ‘hidden curriculum’ and
Miller and Parlett (1974) on ‘cue-consciousness’ – as well as recent research
into assessment. We are grateful to the authors for permission to use their
work.

2. Gibbs and Simpson (2004–5: 10) again: ‘In the Course Experience Questionnaire

(Ramsden, 1991), used extensively in Australia and elsewhere to evaluate the
quality of courses, the questionnaire item that most clearly distinguishes the
best and worst courses is ‘‘Teaching staff here normally give helpful feedback
on how you are going’’ (Ramsden, 1992: 107).’

3. See:

www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/resouces/topic/assessment/cmt/index.

htm (accessed March–September 2004). In what follows frequent use is made
of the English Subject Centre’s website, which has a searchable index
(www.english.heacademy.ac.uk). It offers an excellent review of newer methods
of assessment, along with examples and case studies – as of many other aspects
of the teaching of Literature. Many of the assessment case studies are derived
from the work of the ‘Assessment and The Expanded Text’ consortium, based
at Northumbria University (see the Bibliography at the end of the book under
‘Websites’).

4. See: www.anglia.ac.uk/speakwrite. The Speak-Write Project (HEFCE, Fund for

the Development of Teaching and Learning), based at Anglia Polytechnic
University 1998–2001, focused on oralcy and rhetorical skills in English studies
and developed related material for use by teachers.

Key references

Gibbs, G. and Simpson, C. (2004–5) ‘Conditions under which assessment

supports students’ learning’, Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 1(1):
3–31.

Student assessment

191

Knight, P. T. and Yorke, M. (2003) Assessment, Learning and Employability.

Maidenhead: Open University Press.

Websites

Computer Assisted Assessment Centre, University of Luton at

www.caacentre.ac.uk

UK Higher Education Academy English Subject Centre at www.english.hea.ac.uk

Teaching & Learning English Literature

192

Evaluating teaching;

future trends

Once the process of curriculum planning and course preparation is
complete, what remains is of course to put all the plans into action and
actually teach the programme. However, as we saw in Chapter 4, that
is not quite the end of the story. As teaching proceeds and afterwards,
faculty will be trying to find out how all the decisions they made work
out in practice. Specifically, the Literature department (and no doubt
university authorities) will be interested in such matters as whether
the courses make up a coherent whole, expressing curriculum aims
appropriately, whether the teaching-learning objectives are apt and
achievable and what kind of progress the students make. And the staff
responsible for teaching each of the programme’s courses will want to
know whether all the elements of the course are well designed in
relation to its objectives, whether the syllabus is fruitful, the course
stimulating and interesting to the students, whether the teaching
methods and study activities are effective and whether the methods of
student assessment are appropriate and fair. In other words, the
design and conduct of our courses need to be evaluated in some way
and, in light of the results of such evaluation, adjusted or revised. And
so the course design process comes full cycle.

Evaluative inquiry is our subject in this short final chapter of the

book. The chapter ends with some thoughts about the directions
literature teaching might take in coming years, in the context of trends
in the wider academy and internationally.

VALUATING COURSES AND TEACHING

Here we focus on some of the issues surrounding the evaluation of
courses and teaching as it affects academics as teachers. We saw earlier

in the book that in many countries regimes for assuring quality of
provision at the levels of the department and institution are centrally
inspired and controlled: audit or inspection systems, with requirements
for data of certain kinds to be gathered by university authorities from
staff and students. For instance, universities in Australia and the UK
routinely collect and analyse huge data sets of, variously, patterns of
student enrolment and attendance, dropout rates, continuous assess-
ment and exam pass rates, grade distribution patterns, employment
destinations of graduates, and so on. And routinely students are
surveyed to gauge their satisfaction with their courses and their teaching
as well as with university facilities such as library, study accommoda-
tion, etc. We are not concerned here with this kind of mega-inquiry,
which in any case will be carried out by educationalists, statisticians and
other suitably qualified people according to whatever governmental and
institutional policies prevail. Rather, we are interested in what teachers
can do to satisfy themselves about the courses they offer and their own
performance. In other words, we are interested in ‘action research’.

Action research

This type of inquiry involves teachers’ both investigating a course in
action throughout, and reflecting on their own actions (see Schön, 1983
– and Bleakley’s critique of Schön: ‘ ‘‘Reflective practice’’ is in danger
of becoming a catch-all title for an ill-defined process’ (Bleakley, 1999:
317)). It is formative inquiry, aimed at improving aspects of the course
as it proceeds or next time round, in which teachers compare their
aspirations and intentions to what actually happens on the ground.
But of course what ‘actually happens’ can’t simply be read off the
surface of events. Things may not be quite as they seem, especially
when the inquirer and the course designer/teacher are one and the
same person. So, various strategies and techniques have been pro-
posed for carrying out good research of this kind more objectively.

But it may be that in this context ‘research’ is too grand as a term for
the approach teachers want to take to monitoring and improving what
they do. A number of options are open to us, from the informal all the
way to full-blown investigation.

Self-monitoring

Being observant about how students are engaging with the course
texts and teaching methods, what goes on in the classroom or online

Teaching & Learning English Literature

194

and the students’ progress in assignment work and so on, and mulling
over what we might do better, is at the informal end of the range of
possibilities. And these are things that surely all of us do while going
about our business, as intelligent people who care about the quality
and effectiveness of our teaching and our students’ learning. But as an
aid to such critical reflection, or in order to conduct it on a more
objective and secure footing, some teachers find it helpful to go one
step further: for example, to keep a journal in which they record the
main events of the session (or week, month) along with their thoughts
about these things and any ideas they have for future action. We are
not talking here only about recording teaching-learning problems or
‘failures’. It is equally important to record strategies and events that
worked well, and to reflect on the reasons for their success, so that
they can be replicated with confidence.

Beginning teachers may find this idea particularly helpful, and even

more so if they can team up with a Literature colleague, or better still
a group of them, to talk over some of the issues that emerge. Often,
teaching is not discussed much in the staff room, unlike one’s research,
so being open about these matters no doubt takes a bit of courage to
begin with. Indeed, it may be foolhardy or downright impossible in
departments where the fiction is maintained that teaching is not only
‘no problem’ but is relatively unimportant, and where any attempt to
discuss it is taken to reveal the academic’s failings and unworthiness
for tenure or promotion. Sadly, this happens. However, to us, the
advantages to be gained from a group of people discussing the issues
at the heart of their work – especially people with a similar, and
cooperative, job to do – are blindingly obvious. A perhaps less obvious
but even more valuable outcome in the long run is that the community
of Literature teachers may develop a shared ‘language’ for talk about
their pedagogic practice that is both apt and enabling.

Peer review

In departments in which teaching is rightly valued colleagues may be
able to enlist each others’ assistance somewhat more formally, as
reviewers of proposed course designs (syllabus, teaching-learning
methods and assessment practices) who can offer critique and helpful
advice before a course starts. Once it is underway, a sympathetic
colleague may then act as an occasional observer in the classroom,
recording his or her observations of particular incidents and discuss-

Evaluating teaching; future trends

195

ing them subsequently with the teacher. This is a convincing way of
having one’s own teaching strategies and habits uncovered, and a
more productive way of learning about teaching in general than being
offered injunctions or prescriptions about it by disinterested parties.
Examining video recordings made of teaching sessions can achieve
similar results, especially when they are viewed and discussed by the
teacher in the company of others.

In saying here that these are rather more formal roles for colleagues,

no suggestion of surveillance is in any way intended. Subjecting a
course and teaching to scrutiny by colleagues is a way of making
reflection on one’s own activities a more objective and fruitful process,
and it depends upon trust. Any hint of ‘evidence’ being gathered or of
management’s interest in this process would of course scupper the
very possibility of openness – and of acquiring the insights into
teaching that can benefit all concerned.

Student review

Quite apart from information that the department and institution will
gather from students, teachers themselves may well want to check
whether their perceptions of the course design, of their teaching and
the students’ learning, are similar to those of the students involved
(and of a colleague-observer’s, if this has been solicited). Such
comparisons between the views of different parties is known as
‘triangulation’, a process that yields a more rounded and hence
reliable view of whatever is being investigated.

To gather the students’ views, teachers may ask them to complete a

short questionnaire (anonymously) about their experience of the course
at or near its end, whether in class, online or in their own time. The
teacher may ask which parts of the syllabus the students most enjoyed
studying and think they learned from well (and vice versa), which
teaching methods/sessions they found most interesting and helpful,
what they thought of the essay and other course assignments and so
on. Depending on the size of the group, the questions may be ‘open’
(students write in their answers) or ‘closed’ (e.g. ‘yes/no’ answers or
ticking one response among several given options). Open questions
have the advantage of allowing students to raise the issues that matter
most to them, to illustrate and give reasons for their views. But, as this
suggests, far too much information may be generated, or information
that is too diffuse for the teacher to analyse comfortably when the class

Teaching & Learning English Literature

196

is large. And because the students have to write their responses, this
is a time-consuming task which they may complete only perfunctorily
or not at all. Coded questionnaires of course take less time both to
complete and analyse, but although they allow the teacher to sum the
students’ ‘votes’ they do not yield much information beyond that. And
the teacher receives answers only to the questions he or she has
thought to ask. So a questionnaire that combines closed and open
questions may be the most satisfactory option.

Another way of canvassing students’ views is to hold a discussion

about the course among a representative group, a ‘focus group’, either
face to face or in computer conference. In such discussion it is obviously
easier to follow up an observation or criticism and really to get to the
bottom of any perceived difficulties. And groups will, in the nature of
things, tend to reach a consensus – or, at least, any major differences of
opinion will be clear enough. But the main drawback is that the
students are identifiable so they may be reluctant to be honest about
their experiences and judgements. A way round this is to have someone
other than the teacher conduct the discussion, but this person will not
be as familiar with the course as the teacher and may not pursue the
issues that would be of most interest to the teacher. In any event, if the
discussion is in person it must either be tape recorded or notes must be
scribbled down as fast and as comprehensively as possible while it
proceeds; a computer conference has the advantage of providing a
transcript. And analysing the outcomes will be time-consuming.

Conflicting messages

But what if on some issues no consensus emerges from the students’
responses in questionnaires or discussion, or they even conflict? What
if, on reflection, teacher A does not agree with teacher B’s judgement
about some aspect of her teaching they are reviewing together on
video tape? How does the teacher decide which views to accept, which
to act upon? The notion that a teacher may not agree with another’s
perceptions of an event gives us a clue here, for that disagreement
implies certain criteria of judgement. That is, teacher A has reasons for
her disagreement with teacher B, and these reasons are most likely to
be based on her broad (even if unarticulated) philosophy of education
and the teaching aims that flow from it. To take an obvious example,
if teacher A believes that teaching should be learner-centred she is
unlikely to be persuaded by teacher B that it is a waste of everyone’s

Evaluating teaching; future trends

197

time asking the students to discuss together a matter about which they
know very little. Quite rightly, what teachers do in this situation is
accept feedback and advice that accords with the educational beliefs
that guide their actions, or at least does not conflict with them.

The corollary of this is that it behoves practising teachers to be

aware of and to be able to articulate their underlying beliefs. What
evaluation then reveals is any differences between teachers’ ‘espoused
theories’ (what they think they believe) and their ‘theories-in-action’ –
what they actually seem to be doing in practice (Argyris and Schön,
1974). In this connection, a (suitably adapted) ‘cycle’ of monitoring and
reflection such as that proposed by Kolb (1984) may recommend itself:
do some teaching; reflect on the experience/gather others’ views about
it; conceptualise it, including reading the relevant educational literature;
plan future strategies . . . and so back again to the beginning of the
cycle. But perhaps this sounds like a lot of effort – yet more planned,
purposeful activity on the teacher’s part that begins before a course
starts, continues throughout it and, seemingly, never ends – when
already the academic’s job (teaching, research, administration and
service to the wider university and society) is overwhelming. So,
teachers might be inclined to ask, why go to all that trouble?

Professionalism

Technical professionalism

There are several possible answers to this question, some of them
closely related to the contemporary situation of the academy. As we
have seen, widely and increasingly academics are being held account-
able for the quality of their teaching by funding bodies, by govern-
ments and their agencies. In this situation, as George and Cowan
(1999: 2) put it, ‘It is to the advantage of academics to retain . . .
involvement in the evaluation of their activity, and to ensure continu-
ing respect for their evaluations. They are more likely to do so if they
engage in the process rigorously and from a basis of sound and
objective self-criticism.’ Furthermore, from 2006/7 the UK government
intends to introduce a system of accreditation for new university
teachers, in accordance with certain ‘national professional standards’
which are presently being devised and will eventually be applied to
all academic staff (DfES, 2003:

'4.14). At this stage it looks as if initial

accreditation will be based largely on portfolio evidence of the
teachers’ work over a period, which will include formative evaluation

Teaching & Learning English Literature

198

of aspects of their teaching along with evidence of reflective self-
criticism. In short, as professional teachers we are ‘required’ to
evaluate and try to improve our performance in some way or another.

But surely there are better reasons for attending seriously to our role

as teachers? And a truncated, technical or ‘performative’ professional-
ism, in which our purposes and values as teachers may appear to play
little part, cannot be the most satisfactory conception of what it means
to be professional.

Commitment to students

By contrast, it might be said that we should bother to be self-critical
and to educate ourselves about teaching because, as teachers, we are
necessarily committed to students (the direct objects of our teaching)
and their learning: to their learning well and to their well-being.
Further, since the contexts in which students study (higher education
systems) have changed quite radically in recent years, and continue to
change – especially as regards the curriculum and the range of new
e-teaching methods available to us – we are of necessity experimenting
to a large extent, and we need to know how well we are doing it. For
these reasons alone we may want to keep investigating and trying to
improve our courses and teaching.

Vocation

But, of course, there is more than this to be said about the question of
professionalism. Mills and Huber (2005: 20–2), for example, point out
that the ‘shifting relationship’ between expertise and teaching seen as
a vocation is a complex one which ‘has implications for the status of
academics and for the teaching of the disciplines’. Lately, the shift has
been away from ‘social trustee professionalism’ to ‘expert profes-
sionalism’ (Brint, 1994: 11) and, in this move, the technical aspects of
professionalism have been split off from the moral aspects ‘with [the]
moral and non-market aspects . . . becoming steadily less important’.
The authors continue:

. . . most [academics] would imagine themselves as experts in their own
field, with all the command of disciplinary knowledge, practices and
dispositions that this involves. Yet they would also wish to invoke a
sense of professionalism as a moral vocation to challenge any move
towards standardization.

(Mills and Huber, 2005: 21)

Evaluating teaching; future trends

199

So, educators must insist that disciplinary purposes and values are at
the heart of their professionalism properly understood. One size does
not fit all, in this matter as in many others. And, in general, being
professional in the role of teacher means being ‘reflective, imaginative
and scholarly’ about teaching one’s discipline (p. 20). What the authors
promote, then, is a scholarship of teaching and learning in the different
disciplines. This, they argue, may be one way of ‘side-stepping the
tensions that surround the politicization of learning and teaching
policies in the UK, and between education and the disciplines in the
US’

(p. 22).

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) movement

Described by Mills and Huber as a nascent movement, the SoTL is
nonetheless burgeoning – the founding Council includes members
from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and the UK as
well as the USA, and a first, well attended, international conference
was held in October 2004 in Bloomington, Indiana. Perhaps the SoTL
appeals so widely for the reasons these authors suggest: after all, who
better than discipline-based academics to explore and evaluate their
own discipline’s pedagogy? As they characterise it:

The [SoTL] invites disciplinary faculty to approach their teaching and
their students’ learning with a sense of ‘problem’ in mind . . . This may
involve a sense that one’s pedagogy is not working, or that one would
like to try something new, but it may also involve ‘problems’ of a more
descriptive or visionary sort: what, in fact, are my students learning, or
what kinds of learning might be desirable, possible?

(Mills and Huber, 2005: 23)

Bass sets out some of the movement’s central concerns:

Changing the status of the problem in teaching from terminal remedi-
ation to ongoing investigation is precisely what the scholarship of
teaching is all about. How might we make the problematization of
teaching a matter of communal discourse? How might we think of
teaching practice, and the evidence of student learning, as problems to
be investigated, analysed, represented and debated?

(Bass, 1999: Introduction, para. 1)

Teaching & Learning English Literature

200

No particular methods of such investigation are preferred. They may
include desk work (literature analysis), questionnaire and interview
studies, participant-observation or other ethnographic methods (for
example, see Gunn, 2003), scrutiny of students’ written work or of
video/audio records of classroom interaction (as in Jones et al., 2005),
and so on.

The movement emerged out of the Carnegie Foundation for the

Advancement of Teaching’s long interest in higher education peda-
gogy, and is promoted by the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship
of Teaching and Learning (CASTL). Its intellectual foundations are in
Boyer’s distinction (based on work by Eugene Rice – see Rice (2002)
for a retrospective account) between four forms of scholarship integral
to academic practice: the scholarship of discovery (research), of
teaching (‘transmitting, transforming and extending knowledge’), of
integration and of application (Boyer, 1990: 24), and in the work of
Shulman (1997), who identifies and characterises ‘pedagogical content
knowledge’. Subsequently, Huber and others developed the notion of
distinct disciplinary ‘styles’ and ideas, which, though distinct, may
nevertheless be ‘traded’ across discipline boundaries to everyone’s
advantage (Huber and Morreale, 2002). The Huber and Morreale
volume comprises chapters by authors in different disciplines ‘doing’
the SoTL in their field (see, in particular, Salvatori and Donohue on
English studies: and see Hutchings (2000), also a collection of papers).

A number of researchers and educators who share these concerns

and were already exploring similar ground have recently been
attracted to the SoTL movement: in the UK for instance, see Healey
(2000) on scholarship, Jenkins (1996) and Jenkins et al. (2003), the latter
on relationships between teaching and research. In the past year the
AHHE journal has published three such papers: Jones et al. (2005),
which well exemplifies the kind of investigation that can contribute to
our understanding of teaching and learning Literature; Knights (2005)
which illuminates a ‘crossover area’ between discipline-based research
and a scholarship of teaching in Literature; and Booth (2004) on the
scholarship of teaching in History.

Teaching and research

As reference to Jenkins’s and Knights’s work suggests, the teaching-
research nexus is of particular interest to these scholars. On one hand,
the SoTL movement clearly strives to promote the importance of

Evaluating teaching; future trends

201

teaching in the academy, as a corrective to the great emphasis placed
on the highly (some would say over-) valued and rewarded activity of
specialist disciplinary research. On the other hand, it appears to want
to claim the SoTL as a form of research, and as valid and productive a
form as any other. In any event, it certainly tries to be clearer about
relationships between teaching and research. Where this relationship
is marked, it is commonly conceived in one of three main ways. That
is, teaching may be:

research led – the content of the curriculum is based on the research
interests of the teaching staff,

with an emphasis on students

understanding research findings rather than processes of research;

research oriented – the curriculum places as much emphasis on
understanding the processes by which knowledge is produced as
on learning the knowledge made; skills of inquiry are taught and
practised;

research based – in large part the curriculum is designed around
inquiry-based activities, with research processes integrated in the
student learning activities (for example, problem-based learning:
see Hutchings and O’Rourke (2002) for this approach to teaching
Literature).

To these a fourth conception may be added (i.e. the SoTL):

research informed – teaching draws consciously on systematic
inquiry into the very processes of teaching and learning.

(Adapted from Healey, 2003.)

However, it seems to us that this last conception is different in kind
from the other three, in that those others all make reference to
curriculum and content (the ‘what’ of teaching) – that is to say, to the
academic’s disciplinary knowledge and expertise – whereas the fourth
refers to processes of teaching-learning, the ‘how’ of it. Traditionally,
academics are much more comfortable grappling with the former than
the last – which is pretty much SoTL’s point. So, we may ask, what
might persuade academics-as-teachers to take processes of teaching
and learning more seriously? The answer, according to Diamond and
Adam (2004), is nothing short of reconceptualising scholarship ‘for the
21st century’ and associated institutional change.

Teaching & Learning English Literature

202

Scholarship redefined

Since around 1990 Robert Diamond has undertaken a number of
large-scale inquiries into relationships between scholarship, profes-
sional service and academic reward systems in US universities, among
faculty (of all disciplines), disciplinary associations and academic
administrators, on behalf of the American Association for Higher
Education among other bodies (Diamond and Adam, 2004: 35–6). The
main problem he unearthed concerns the very narrow definitions of
scholarship that operate in the academy, which ‘influence faculty
priorities and engagement’ (p. 34), and a corresponding lack of
recognition of other, important, aspects of the academic’s work which
also have the characteristics of traditional scholarship. Consequently,
the authors conclude:

If we can focus on the qualities of scholarly work and use an approach
that is accepted by the academic disciplines, we may have a definition of
scholarship for the 21st century . . . what we propose as a model . . . has
the advantage of addressing both the product and the process of scholarly
work.

(p. 37)

The ‘Criteria for Scholarly Activity’ that emerged from all these studies
and negotiations are as follows.

Requires a high level of discipline-related expertise.

Conducted in a scholarly manner with clear goals, adequate
preparation and appropriate methodology.

The work and its results are appropriately documented and
disseminated. This reporting includes reflective critique address-
ing the significance of the work, the process of inquiry and what
was learned.

Has significance beyond the individual context.

Breaks new ground or is innovative.

Can be replicated or elaborated.

The work – both product and process – is reviewed and judged to
be meritorious and significant by a panel of peers.

It will be the responsibility of the academic unit or department to
determine if the activity or work falls within the priorities of the
department, school/college, discipline and institution.

(Diamond and Adam, 2003: 37–8)

Evaluating teaching; future trends

203

‘Interestingly’, the authors add, ‘some of the studies or articles
published in recognized journals today may not meet the criteria just
listed.’

However, when these conditions are met, they argue, whatever the focus

of the work it is scholarly and should count as such in the institution’s
reward/promotion system. Thus ‘valuing work based on dollars
generated or numbers of publications accumulated will be replaced with
institutional guidelines stressing significance of work’ and ‘it will be
possible, perhaps for the first time, for faculty priorities to come together
with institutional missions and vision’. Such an inclusive definition of
scholarly work would encompass both research as traditionally
understood and, for example, the scholarship of teaching and learning.

Conclusion

Discussion of a scholarship of teaching and learning has of course taken
us well beyond the much more modest aims with which we began this
chapter: to suggest effective and efficient ways in which all teachers
can monitor, evaluate and try to improve their course designs and
teaching practices. As we remarked, this process completes the
curriculum development ‘loop’ – for the first time that is, since
teachers will want to satisfy themselves that any changes they make
to their courses as a result really are improvements. By contrast, the
formal and systematic kind of inquiry that the SoTL movement
proposes will not be an attractive proposition to all teachers, although
all of us should surely be aware of the scholarly work that has been
carried out in our discipline or field. But we would say that the
movement’s emphasis on recognising and rewarding the full range of
scholarly activity that goes on in our universities is a meaningful and
overdue corrective. The kind of institutional change that Huber and
Diamond call for would open up much wider possibilities for our
work as academics, offering opportunities for individuals to be
rewarded for putting their knowledge and talents to best use and
pursuing the interests that best express their and their discipline/
department’s concerns. A view of professionalism related to the
academic vocation – grounded in the discipline or field, in its
purposes, values and scholarly activities – is, we would say, far
preferable to the notion of ‘expert’ professionalism, in which teachers
are required to perform their work according to generic prescriptions
and predefined standards shorn of academic significance.

Teaching & Learning English Literature

204

RENDS

We end this chapter, and indeed the book, with a brief discussion of
the direction higher education seems to be taking and how this might
impact on the discipline. As the term ‘trends’ suggests, we are here
extrapolating from observations made throughout the book. But rather
than simply repeat these observations in summary form, we will
present instead some issues and unifying questions posed by a major
international conference on the Humanities sponsored by the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Central concerns

At the conference ‘Alternative Wor(l)ds: The Humanities in 2010’
(Demers, 2002), over 100 delegates from all constituencies in more than
30 Canadian universities, along with representatives of the US
National Endowment for the Humanities, the MLA and the (then) UK
Arts and Humanities Research Board, spent their time considering
questions put to them by a panel who had read and consulted widely
beforehand in order to identify a set of central themes for discussion.
These questions, then, represent the concerns of a large and varied
body of humanists. Adapting Demers’s account, they may be re-
presented under three main headings: the nature and purposes of
humanities disciplines; new paradigms and fields; new methods of
teaching and learning.

Disciplinary purposes

Discussion about the nature and purposes of the Humanities focused
on this question (Demers, 2002: 18):

Who should set the academic agenda for the universities?

The issues that arose and were explored included many of the
‘external pressures’ discussed throughout this book. Almost every-
where the academic agenda is tending to be set by others than
academics themselves, whether they like it or not. In many countries
the ‘needs’ of the economy are the pre-eminently shaping force,
which has led to wider participation in higher education/massification
and an accompanying decline in resource for it, and to an emphasis
on the teaching and learning of marketable skills. While increasing

Evaluating teaching; future trends

205

governmental control over the higher education sector as a whole is a
far less marked outcome in North America than in Australia, South
Africa and the UK, greater ‘accountability’ is a noticeable trend
everywhere. And public funding for research into teaching and
learning follows this external agenda, tending to focus on student
recruitment and retention (e.g. students’ transition from schooling
and, via ‘study skills’ teaching, their preparedness for university), on
students’ acquisition of marketable skills and their employability upon
graduation. In this situation, humanities academics are of course
asking themselves whether recent department mergers and closures
are driven solely by this agenda or whether there may indeed be
growing scepticism among the public about the value of their
disciplines. In any event, the prognosis hardly seems encouraging.
Unless, that is, the Humanities can and will accommodate to the
external agenda?

New fields and paradigms

What are the elements that make a humanities/liberal arts degree
important today – and attractive to the student population? . . . What
new models for . . . the humanities should we examine?

On an accommodating view of things, the skills honed in study of the
Humanities – skills of analysis, interpretation, evaluation, synthesis
and communication in speech and writing – are both widely needed
in and transferable to the workplace. It would suggest examination of
issues-, problem- or practice-based curriculum models and, in general,
a broader educational offering (e.g. multidisciplinary, modular) rather
than discipline-specific study. In this connection, a ‘cultural studies’
umbrella, or study of Literature combined with creative writing and
modern cultural forms such as film, television or media, might be
preferred. As we saw, curricula such as these are in fact popular
among students in the UK and, as we shall see in a moment, the
possibilities for study of postcolonial and world literatures may
receive a fillip from a perhaps unexpected quarter.

New teaching-learning and assessment methods

What new methods of teaching and learning in the humanities should
we examine?

Teaching & Learning English Literature

206

Continuing to pursue this line of thought, our students’ use and
mastery of ICTs would of course be seen as essential. Even in
conventional universities, ‘blended’ teaching-learning methods would
become the norm – that is, traditional methods combined with
e-tuition and e-learning (the kinds of media and method discussed in
Chapter 5 – DVD and multimedia CD-ROM, databases, the Internet,
digital resources such as e-books, text-search software, and e-mail
discussion, computer conferencing, online collaborative work, re-
source-based learning . . .). We might also expect greater emphasis on
group work and presentation skills in preparation for what is required
in many jobs. Methods of assessing students’ work would need to
become correspondingly broader, to include portfolio and even
practice-based modes, self- and peer-review, and assessment of group
work.

‘No change’

But, if humanities educators reject the idea of accommodating the
external agenda, then:

How can [they] build and promote a shared vision of the contribution of
a humanities education to students, employers, governments and the
general public?

In other words, assuming that as humanities educators we can agree
among ourselves, how could we convince all these parties of the value
to them of our conception of what we offer? We will not repeat here
ideas about unity of purpose and direction discussed in Chapter 1 of
the book but, perforce, leave this important question open for the
moment. In any case, there is one development – currently not much
remarked upon within the academy – that just might cast the concerns
discussed here in a different mould.

The trend towards globalisation

The all-encompassing trend we wish to draw attention to is the
‘globalisation’ of higher education, in the context of the advent of
GATS – the 1995 General Agreement on Trade in Services. While we
may all be familiar with the notion of liberalisation and globalisation
in trade, these ideas are fairly new as applied to services. The
Agreement is operated by the World Trade Organisation (under the

Evaluating teaching; future trends

207

auspices of the UN), the 145 member countries of which account for
97 per cent of world trade:

GATS is the first multinational agreement [between member countries]
to provide legally enforceable rights to trade in all services. It has a
built-in commitment to continuous liberalization through periodic
negotiations. And it is the world’s first multinational agreement on
investment, since it covers not just cross-border trade but every possible
means of supplying a service, including the right to set up a commercial
presence in the export market.

(World Trade Organisation Secretariat, 2002)

Education is among the services concerned. And, according to
Hawkridge (2005: 7), ‘In the medium- to long-term, GATS has serious
organisational, cultural, legal, political and economic implications for
. . . education.’

Under the Agreement, countries are expected to file requests for

liberalisation of services in other countries and also to offer to liberalise
their own services. So far, the USA has requested access to higher
education, adult education, training and educational testing services in
all countries and, along with Australia and New Zealand, is pressing
for full liberalisation of the education market. The UK and Canada,
however, have declared that they are not offering access to their
publicly-funded education services. As yet many countries have not
made their position on GATS known, though they will have to before
long. And the stakes are extremely high for countries that export
education (that is, the richer western countries): in 2000, for example,
exports of educational services were worth over $10 billion to the USA,
$3.7 billion to the UK, $2.1 billion to Australia and $0.8 billion to
Canada (Larsen et al., 2002). These countries are no doubt planning to
reap far greater rewards once the Agreement is fully underway.

Some internationalisation of education, then, seems inevitable and is

indeed underway – although whether the effects in exporting coun-
tries will be felt right across the higher education system, will be more
or less confined to distance education institutions and some existing
‘flagship’ universities or will mainly give rise to new, commercial
forms of higher education is a matter of conjecture. In any case, such
globalisation is predicated on extensive use of ICTs. When an
institution has these technologies at its disposal it is of course possible
to attract and educate students from locations anywhere in the world,

Teaching & Learning English Literature

208

provided the necessary technology is available or can be made
available there, without the trouble and expense of setting up satellite
campuses in those locations. This might be an attractive proposition
for many universities in a situation of inadequate public funding for
higher education: they may want to seek new global markets to
maintain their income or, in the case of distance teaching universities,
to achieve greater economies of scale. As Hawkridge (2005: 2) remarks:

Proponents [of globalisation] see knowledge as a commodity and
education as a service, to be traded globally, and students everywhere as
customers whose needs can and must be met through globalisation,
which is a creative gale.

And they would claim positive advantages for it: enrichment of the
curriculum, wide provision of high-quality courses and scarce staff
expertise made available to students in many countries. Indeed, perhaps
some of these considerations underlie MIT’s decision to make its
‘courseware’ freely available (OpenCourseWare at MIT (US): http://
ocw.mit.edu/index.html). But globalisation of higher education has many
detractors too, who see it as more of a destructive than a creative force.

Some regard cognition in e-learning as different from that in embodied

forms of education and inferior to it (see Dreyfus, 2001, and also critique
of his argument in Blake, 2002). Others fear that global education will
tend to impose common curricula, teaching-learning methods and
indeed the English language, ultimately reducing cultural diversity (see
Chambers, 2002b; Ess, 2001). Furthermore, it is seen as incompatible with
social objectives in many countries (Stromquist and Monkman, 2000):
‘nowhere are the poor able to benefit from services they cannot pay for’
(Hawkridge, 2005: 2). Finally, the ‘nightmare scenario’ of a takeover of
higher education by private companies is said to threaten us all:
corporations such as Microsoft, publishers like McGraw-Hill and
Pearson, and private for-profit universities.

Interestingly, this threat is sometimes taken as a reason for publicly-

funded universities to enter the global marketplace as soon as possible
in order to do the job properly, despite any misgivings they may have.
In that process, it is thought that mergers or collaborations between
institutions might be needed, producing some reconfiguration of
higher education in the provider countries. And, paradoxically, the
greater emphasis on cultural and intercultural issues that would ensue
might be expected to offer extra business for the Humanities.

Evaluating teaching; future trends

209

In short, if a public higher education institution decided to enter the

global market then some quite radical changes might be implied.

Change to curricula and the contents of courses in order to accommodate
students from other countries and cultures. In Literature, this might
accelerate moves towards redefining the discipline, from a
national/culture-based conception (English, Canadian, Australian
literature, etc.) to something like Literatures in English or post-
colonial literatures – accompanied by the teaching of correspond-
ingly wider literary traditions and texts. (And, in this connection,
see Cornwell, 2006.)

Changes in staff recruitment. With ever greater emphasis on ICTs
and e-tuition, one might expect not only compulsory training in
this kind of teaching to be introduced for all faculty, but also
recruitment of educational technologists, library and technical
staff in greater numbers and much closer working relationships
between them and faculty. Indeed, ‘learning design’ might tend to
be taken out of discipline-based academics’ hands to a greater
degree than many expect or wish.

More stringent quality assurance measures. These would be of the
essence in a competitive global market in order to attract large
numbers of overseas students, so one might expect government to
exercise even tighter controls over institutions and they, in turn,
over academic departments and individual employees.

Commercialisation/standardisation. The tendency for universities to
be treated as businesses would become a reality – they would
indeed be global businesses, presumably run primarily on eco-
nomic principles. So if the Literature department (and any other
discipline or field) failed to recruit students in sufficient numbers
then presumably it would be merged with other departments or
axed. That is, unless these businesses preferred to sacrifice public
funding altogether and become private institutions – a move that
some ‘premier’ UK universities are already threatening to make,
with the intention of removing themselves from government
regulation precisely in order to reinstate the educational prin-
ciples they see as being compromised at present. But whether, as
businesses, they would be successful in this is debatable.

Seen in this context, for Literature (and the Humanities more widely)
to adopt a position of ‘no change’ is a non-starter. As we have seen

Teaching & Learning English Literature

210

throughout the book, many such changes are either already underway
or the groundwork for them is laid. But, whether we find these ideas
exciting or depressing, we should remember that they are only
possibilities for the future of the academy. What we may be able to do
– as so often before – is to bend them to our purposes. And for that we
need to be clear about, and in agreement about, what our purposes as
educators are.

This takes us right back to the beginning of the book. Ideas

discussed in Chapter 1, regarding unity of purpose and a ‘speaking
with one voice’, only gain added urgency. The question that should
concern us now is: are we prepared to take this challenge to the
Humanities seriously?

Notes

1. We will not go into these strategies in great detail here. George and Cowan

(1999) discuss a range of examples in different academic settings, many of
which may be adapted to literature teaching. Parlett and Hamilton (1972) offer
a basis in theory; Angelo and Cross (1993) and Calder (1994) suggest a variety
of techniques. Also see Hatfield (1995) and Hillier (2002).

2. Prior to this account of professionalism the authors discuss the rise of ‘faculty

development’ in the USA (its UK equivalent being ‘staff/educational develop-
ment’), and reasons for the relatively low status that ‘education’ has among
discipline-based academics – a fascinating discussion but tangential to this
theme.

3. Whether or not the curriculum is based on staff’s research interests, in Chapter

4 (under ‘Normal provision’) we saw that, in the UK at least, staff’s research
interests are certainly a major influence on the curriculum (Halcrow Group et
al., 2003: 55).

Key references

George, J. and Cowan, J. (1999) A Handbook of Techniques for Formative Evaluation:

Mapping the Student’s Learning Experience. London: Kogan Page.

Huber, M. T. and Morreale, P. (eds) (2002) Disciplinary Styles in the Scholarship of

Teaching and Learning: Exploring Common Ground. Washington, DC: American
Association for Higher Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching.

Schön, D. A. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner. New York: Basic Books.

Websites

World Trade Organisation Secretariat (2002) Trading into the Future, at:

http://www.wto.org

Evaluating teaching; future trends

211

Bibliography

Agathocleus, T. and Dean, A. (eds) (2002) Teaching Literature: A Companion.

Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Angelil-Carter, S. (ed.) (1998) Access to Success. Literacy in Academic Contexts. Cape

Town: University of Cape Town Press.

Angelo, T. A. and Cross, K. P. (1993) Classroom Assessment Techniques, 2nd edn. San

Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Argyris, C. and Schön, D. A. (1974) Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional

Effectiveness. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Bakhtin, M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Ballard, B. and Clanchy, J. (1988) ‘Literacy in the university: an ‘‘anthropological’’

approach’, in G. Taylor, B. Ballard, V. Beasley, H. K. Bock, J. Clanchy and P.
Nightingale (eds), Literacy by Degrees. Milton Keynes: SRHE/Open University
Press, pp. 7–23.

Barnett, R. (2003) Beyond all Reason: Living with Ideology in the University.

Buckingham: SRHE/Open University Press.

Barnett, R. and Coate, K. (2005) Engaging the Curriculum in Higher Education.

Maidenhead: SRHE/Open University Press.

Barrow, R. (2004) ‘Language and character’, Arts and Humanities in Higher

Education, 3(3): 267–79.

Barry, P. (1995) Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory.

Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Barry, P. (2003) English in Practice: In Pursuit of English Studies. London: Arnold.
Bass, R. (1999) ‘The scholarship of teaching: what’s the problem?’, Inventio: Creative

Thinking about Learning and Teaching, 1(1). Available at: www.doit.gmu.edu/
Archives/feb98/randybass.htm.

Becher, T. and Trowler, P. (2001) Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry

and the Cultures of Disciplines, 2nd edn. Buckingham: SRHE/Open University
Press.

Bernstein, B. (1975) Class, Codes and Control: Towards a Theory of Educational

Transmission, Vol. 3. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Berry, W. (1983) Standing by Words. San Francisco: North Point Press.
Bérubé, M. (2003) ‘The utility of the arts and humanities’, Arts and Humanities in

Higher Education, 2(1): 23–40.

Bérubé, M. and Nelson, C. (eds) (1995) Higher Education Under Fire: Politics,

Economics and the Crisis of the Humanities. New York and London: Routledge.

Birkerts, S. (1994) Gutenberg Elegies. New York: Random House.
Birkerts, S. (1996) Tolstoy’s Dictaphone: Technology and the Muse. St Paul, MN:

Graywolf Press.

Bizell, P. (1982) ‘Cognition, convention, and certainty: what we need to know

about writing’, RE TEXT, 3(3): 213–44.

Blake, N. (2000) ‘Paralogy, validity claims and the politics of know-

ledge: Habermas, Lyotard and higher education’, in P. A. Dhillon and P.
Standish (eds), Lyotard: Just Education. London: Routledge, pp. 54–72.

Blake, N. (2002) ‘Hubert Dreyfus on distance education: relays of educational

embodiment’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 34(4): 379–85. (Symposium on
Hubert Dreyfus’s ‘On the Internet’.)

Blake, N. and Standish, P. (eds) (2000) Enquiries at the Interface: Philosophical

Problems of Online Education. Oxford: Blackwell.

Blake, N., Smeyers, P., Smith, R. and Standish, P. (1998) Thinking Again: Education

after Postmodernism. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey.

Bleakley, A. (1999) ‘From reflective practice to holistic reflexivity’, Studies in Higher

Education, 24(3): 315–30.

Bleich, D. (2001) ‘The materiality of language and the pedagogy of exchange’,

Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and
Culture, 1(1): 117–41.

Bligh, D. (1998 [1971]) What’s the Use of Lectures?, 5th edn. Exeter: Intellect.
Booth, A. (2004) ‘Rethinking the scholarly: developing the scholarship of teaching

in history’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 3(3): 247–66.

Boughey, C. (2003) ‘From equity to efficiency: access to higher education in South

Africa’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 2(1): 65–71.

Bourdieu, P. (1988) Homo Academicus. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Boyer, E. (1990) Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. Princeton, NJ:

Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Brint, S. (1994) In an Age of Experts: The Changing Role of Professionals in Politics and

Public Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Brookfield, S. D. (1986) Understanding and Facilitating Adult Learning. Buckingham:

Open University Press.

Bruner, J. (1983) Child’s Talk: Learning to Use Language. Oxford: Oxford University

Press.

Bruner, J. (1986) Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA and London:

Harvard University Press.

Bruner, J. (1996a) The Culture of Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bruner, J. (1996b) ‘Frames for thinking: ways of making meaning’, in D. R. Olson

and N. Torrance (eds), Modes of Thought: Explorations in Culture and Cognition.
Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, pp. 93–105.

Calder, J. (1994) Programme Evaluation and Quality. London: Kogan Page.
Chambers, E. A. (1992) ‘Work-load and the quality of student learning’, Studies in

Higher Education, 17(2): 141–53.

Bibliography

213

Chambers, E. A. (ed.) (2000) ‘Computers in humanities teaching and research:

dispatches from the disciplines’, Computers and the Humanities, 34(3): Special
Issue.

Chambers, E. A. (2001) ‘Critical humanism’, in E. A. Chambers (ed.), Contemporary

Themes in Humanities Higher Education. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers,
pp. 1–20.

Chambers, E. A. (2002a) ‘Understanding students’ learning ‘‘from the inside’’’, in

T. Evans (ed.), Research in Distance Education 5. Geelong: Deakin University
Press. Available at: http://www.deakin.edu.au/education/RIPVET/RIDE–
Papers/.

Chambers, E. A. (2002b) ‘Cultural imperialism or pluralism? Cross-cultural

electronic teaching in the humanities’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education,
2(3): 249–64.

Chambers, E. A. and Northedge, A. (1997) The Arts Good Study Guide. Milton

Keynes: Open University.

Channon, G. (2000) ‘Tailor-made or off-the-peg? Virtual courses in the humanities’,

Computers and the Humanities, 34(3): 255–64. (Special Issue: ‘Computers in
Humanities Teaching and Research: Dispatches from the Disciplines’.)

Coffin, C., Curry, M. J., Goodman, S., Hewings, A., Lillis, T. M. and Swann, J.

(2003) Teaching Academic Writing: A Toolkit for Higher Education. London and
New York: Routledge.

Cornwell, G. (2006, forthcoming) ‘On the ‘‘Africanisation’’ of English Studies in

South Africa’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 5(2).

Crème, P. and Lea, M. (2003 [1997]) Writing at University: A Guide for Students, 2nd

edn. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Crowley, S. (1999) Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays.

Pittsburgh: Pennsylvania University Press.

Crowther, J., Hamilton, M. and Tett, L. (eds) (2001) Powerful Literacies. Leicester:

NIACE.

Dahlgren, L. O. and Marton, F. (1978) ‘Students’ conceptions of subject matter’,

Studies in Higher Education, 3(1): 25–35.

Delbanco, A. (1999) ‘The decline and fall of literature’, New York Review of Books,

4, November: 32–8.

Demers, P. (2002) ‘Horizon of possibilities: a Canadian perspective on the

humanities’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 1(1): 11–26.

DfES (Department for Education and Skills) (2003) The Future of Higher Education

(White Paper).

London: DfES. Available at: http://www.dfes.gov.uk/

hegateway/hereform/index.cfm.

Diamond, R. M. and Adam, B. E. (2004) ‘Balancing institutional, disciplinary and

faculty priorities with public and social needs: defining scholarship for the 21st
century’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 3(1): 29–40.

Donohue, C. (2004) ‘Writing and teaching the disciplines in France: current

conversations and connections’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 3(1):
59–79.

Dreyfus, H. (2001) On the Internet. New York: Routledge.

Teaching & Learning English Literature

214

Duguid, S. (1984) ‘The humanities and higher education’, Canadian Journal of

Higher Education, XIV(1): 41–58.

Eaglestone, R. (2002) Doing English: A Guide for Literature Students. London:

Routledge.

Eagleton, T. (1996 [1983]) Literary Theory: An Introduction, 2nd edn. Oxford:

Blackwell.

Easthope, A. (1991) Literary into Cultural Studies. London: Routledge.
Edwards, R. and Usher, R. (2001) ‘Lifelong learning: a postmodern condition of

education?’, Adult Education Quarterly, 51(4): 273–87.

Eisner, E. W. (1976) ‘Educational connoisseurship and criticism: their form and

functions in educational evaluation’, Journal of Aesthetic Education, 10(3–4):
135–50.

Eisner, E. W. (1985) The Educational Imagination: On the Design and Evaluation of

School Programs, 2nd edn. New York: Macmillan.

Elbow, P. (1998) Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process,

2nd edn. New York: Oxford University Press.

Ellis, J. (1997) Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities.

New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Entwistle, N. and Ramsden, P. (1983) Understanding Student Learning. London:

Croom Helm.

Ess, C. (2000) ‘Wag the dog? Online conferencing and teaching’, Computers and the

Humanities, 34(3): 297–309.

Ess, C. (2001) ‘What’s culture got to do with it? Cultural collisions in the electronic

global village, creative interferences, and the rise of culturally-mediated
computing’, in C. Ess (ed.) with F. Sudweeks, Culture, Technology, Communica-
tion: Towards an Intercultural Global Village. Albany, NY: State University of New
York Press, pp. 1–50.

Evans, C. (1993) English People: The Experience of Teaching and Learning English in

British Universities. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Evans, C. (ed.) (1995) Developing University English Teaching. Lampeter: Edwin

Mellen Press.

Feldman, C. F. and Kalmar, D. (1996) ‘Autobiography and fiction as modes of

thought’, in D. Olson and N. Torrance (eds), Modes of Thought: Explorations in
Culture and Cognition. Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 106–22.

Gadamer, H.-G. (1989) Truth and Method, 2nd revised edn, trans. J. Weinsheimer

and D. G. Marshall. London: Sheed & Ward.

Garrison, D. R. (1991) ‘Developing critical thinking in adult learners’, International

Journal of Lifelong Education, 10(4): 287–303.

Geertz, C. (1975) The Interpretation of Cultures. London: Hutchinson.
George, J. and Cowan, J. (1999) A Handbook of Techniques for Formative Evaluation:

Mapping the Student’s Learning Experience. London: Kogan Page.

Gibbs, G. and Simpson, C. (2004–5) ‘Conditions under which assessment supports

students’ learning’, Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 1(1): 3–31.

Graff, G. (1995) Literature Against Itself. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.

Bibliography

215

Graff, G. (2003) ‘Conflict clarifies: a response’, Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to

Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, 3(2): 266–73. (‘Sympo-
sium: Teaching the Conflicts at Twenty Years’: 245–75.)

Gregory, M. (1995) ‘The sound of story: narrative, memory and selfhood’,

Narrative, 3(1): 33–56.

Gregory, M. (1997) ‘The many-headed hydra of theory vs. the unifying mission of

teaching’, College English, 59(1): 41–58.

Gregory, M. (2001) ‘Curriculum, pedagogy, and teacherly ethos’, Pedagogy: Critical

Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, 1(1): 69–90.

Gregory, M. (2002) ‘The politics of difference vs the ethics of essentializing: looking

back and looking forward in humanities discourse about human nature’, Arts
and Humanities in Higher Education, 1(2): 125–44.

Guillory, J. (1993) Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press.

Gunn, V. (2003) ‘Transforming subject boundaries: the interface between higher

education teaching and learning theories and subject-specific knowledge’, Arts
and Humanities in Higher Education, 2(3): 265–80.

Guy, J. M. and Small, I. (1993) Politics and Value in English Studies: A Discipline in

Crisis? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Haggis, T. (2003) ‘Constructing images of ourselves? a critical investigation into

‘‘approaches to learning’’ research in higher education’, British Educational
Research Journal, 29(1): 89–104.

Halcrow Group with Gawthrope, J. and Martin, P. (2003) A Report to the LTSN

English Subject Centre: Survey of the English Curriculum and Teaching in UK Higher
Education. Royal Holloway, University of London: LTSN English Subject Centre
(Report Series Number 8).

Halliday, M. A. K. (1985) Spoken and Written Language. Oxford: Oxford University

Press.

Hardwick, L. (2001) ‘Critical humanism in action: towards reading Aeschylus’ The

Persians’, in E. A. Chambers (ed.), Contemporary Themes in Humanities Higher
Education. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 45–64.

Hatfield, S. R. (ed.) (1995) The Seven Principles in Action: Improving Undergraduate

Education. Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing.

Hawkridge, D. (2005) Globalisation and Business Education. Paper presented at the

Open University, UK, February 2005.

Healey, M. (2000) ‘Developing the scholarship of teaching: a discipline-based

approach’, Higher Education Research and Development, 19(2): 169–89.

Healey, M. (2003) Linking Research and Teaching: A Disciplinary Perspective. Paper

presented to the Society for Research into Higher Education Annual Conference
‘Research, Scholarship and Teaching: Changing Relationships?’, Royal Hollo-
way University of London, 16–18 December 2003.

Hillier, Y. (2002) Reflective Teaching in Further and Adult Education. London and

New York: Continuum.

Hirst, P. H. (1974) Knowledge and the Curriculum: A Collection of Philosophical Papers.

London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Teaching & Learning English Literature

216

Hirst, P. H. and Peters, R. S. (1970) The Logic of Education. London: Routledge &

Kegan Paul.

Hopkins, C. (2001) Thinking About Texts: An Introduction to English Studies.

Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave.

Huber, M. T. and Morreale, P. (eds) (2002) Disciplinary Styles in the Scholarship of

Teaching and Learning: Exploring Common Ground. Washington, DC: American
Association for Higher Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching.

Hutchings, P. (ed.) (2000) Opening Lines: Approaches to the Scholarship of Teaching

and Learning. Menlo Park, CA: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of
Teaching.

Hutchings, W. and O’Rourke, K. (2002) ‘Problem-based learning in literary

studies’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 1(1): 73–83.

Insko, J. (2003) ‘Generational canons’, Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching

Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, 3(3): 341–58.

Ivanicˇ, R. (1998) Writing and Identity: The Discoursal Construction of Identity in

Academic Writing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Jay, G. S. (1997) American Literature and the Culture Wars. Ithaca, NY: Cornell

University Press.

Jenkins, A. (1996) ‘Discipline-based educational development’, International Journal

of Academic Development, 1(1): 50–62.

Jenkins, A., Breen, R. and Lindsay, R. (2003) Reshaping Teaching in Higher Education:

Linking Teaching with Research. London: SEDA/Kogan Page.

Jonathan, R. (2000) ‘Cultural diversity and public education: reasonable negoti-

ation and hard cases’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 34(2): 337–94.

Jones, K., McLean, M., Amigoni, D. and Kinsman, M. (2005) ‘Investigating the

production of university English in mass higher education: towards an
alternative methodology’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 4(3): 247–64.

Kelly, M. (2001) ‘‘‘Serrez ma haire avec ma discipline’’: reconfiguring the

structures and concepts’, in R. di Napoli, L. Polezzi and A. King (eds), Fuzzy
Boundaries? Reflections on Modern Languages and the Humanities. London: CILT,
pp. 43–56.

Kirkwood, A. (2003) ‘Going outside the box: skills development, cultural change

and the use of on-line resources’. Internal report, Open University. Available at:
http://kn.open.ac.uk/public/document.cfm?docid

:3946.

Knight, P. T. (2001) ‘Complexity and curriculum: a process approach to curricu-

lum-making’, Teaching in Higher Education, 6(3): 369–81.

Knight, P. T. (forthcoming) ‘The local practices of assessment’, Assessment and

Evaluation in Higher Education, 31.

Knight, P. T. and Yorke, M. (2003) Assessment, Learning and Employability.

Maidenhead: Open University Press.

Knights, B. (1992) From Reader to Reader: Theory, Text and Practice in the Study Group.

London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Knights, B. (2005) ‘Intelligence and interrogation: the identity of the English

student’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 4(1): 33–52.

Bibliography

217

Kolb, D. (1984) Experiential Learning. New York: Prentice Hall.
Kress, G. (1998) ‘Visual and verbal modes of representation in electronically

mediated communication: the potentials of new forms of text’, in I. Snyder (ed.),
Page to Screen: Taking Literacy into the Electronic Era. London: Routledge, pp.
53–79.

Kress, G. (2003) Literacy in the New Media Age. London: Routledge.
Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1999) Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its

Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.

Larsen, K., Martin, J. P. and Morris, R. (2002) Trade in Educational Services: Trends

and Emerging Issues, Working Paper. Paris: OECD.

Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991) Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1999) ‘Learning and pedagogy in communities of

practice’, in J. Leach and B. Moon (eds), Learners and Pedagogy. Buckingham:
Open University Press, pp. 21–77.

Lea, M. R. and Street, B. V. (1998) ‘Student writing in higher education: an

academic literacies approach’, Studies in Higher Education, 23(2): 157–72.

Lentricchia, F. and DuBois, A. (2003) Close Reading: The Reader. Durham, NC: Duke

University Press.

Levine, G. (2001) ‘The two nations’, Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching

Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, 1(1): 7–19.

Lillis, T. (2001) Student Writing: Access, Regulation, Desire. London: Routledge.
Lyotard, J.-F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester:

Manchester University Press.

McCurrie, M. K. (2004) ‘From the edges to the center: pedagogy’s role in

redefining English departments’, Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching
Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, 4(1): 43–64.

Macdonald, J., Weller, M. and Mason, R. (2000) Innovative Assessment Practices in

Networked Courses at the Open University. Milton Keynes: Open University,
Institute of Educational Technology Centre for Information Technology in
Education (CITE) Report 260, July.

McGann, J. with Griffith, J., Kremer, J., Kroeger, R. L., Moriarty, B., Pikler, J.,

Simpson, B. and Stephenson, K. (2001) ‘ ‘‘Reading fiction/teaching fiction’’: a
pedagogical experiment’, Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature,
Language, Composition, and Culture, 1(1): 143–65.

McKibben, W. (1992) The Age of Missing Information. New York: Random House.
McLean, M. (2001) ‘Can we relate conceptions of learning to student academic

achievement?’, Teaching in Higher Education, 6: 399–413.

Marton, F. and Säljö, R. (1976a) ‘On qualitative differences in learning I – outcome

and process’, British Journal of Educational Psychology, 46: 4–11.

Marton, F. and Säljö, R. (1976b) ‘On qualitative differences in learning II – outcome

as a function of the learner’s conception of the task’, British Journal of Educational
Psychology, 46: 115–27.

Marton, F., Hounsell, D. and Entwistle, N. (eds) (1984) The Experience of Learning.

Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press.

Teaching & Learning English Literature

218

Miller, C. M. I. and Parlett, M. (1974) Up to the Mark: A Study of the Examination

Game. Guildford: Society for Research into Higher Education.

Miller, M. C. (1988) Boxed In. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Mills, D. and Huber, M. T. (2005) ‘Anthropology and the educational ‘‘trading

zone’’: disciplinarity, pedagogy and professionalism’, Arts and Humanities in
Higher Education, 4(1): 9–32.

Mitchell, S. and Andrews, R. (2000) Learning to Argue in Higher Education.

Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook Publishers.

MLA (Modern Language Association) (2000) Handbook for Writers of Research

Papers, 5th edn. New York: MLA.

Monroe, J. (2002) Writing and Revising the Disciplines. Ithaca, NY: Cornell

University Press.

Moore, T. (2004) ‘The critical thinking debate: how general are general thinking

skills?’, Higher Education Research and Development, 23(1): 3–18.

Murray, D. (1987) Write to Learn. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education (The Dearing Report) (1997)

Higher Education in the Learning Society. Norwich: HMSO.

National Endowment for the Arts (2004) Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary

Reading in America. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts
(Research Division Report No. 46). Available at: http://www.nea.gov/pub/
ReadingAtRisk.pdf.

Neilson, J. (1997) How Users Read on the Web. Available at: www.useit.com/

alertbox/9710a.html.

Northedge, A. (2003) ‘Enabling participation in academic discourse’, Teaching in

Higher Education, 8(2): 169–80.

Olson, D. R. (1996) ‘Literate mentalities: literacy, consciousness of language, and

modes of thought’, in D. R. Olson and N. Torrance (eds), Modes of Thought:
Explorations in Culture and Cognition. Cambridge, New York and Melbourne:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 141–51.

Parker, J. (2001) ‘Humanities higher education: new models, new challenges’, in

E. A. Chambers (ed.), Contemporary Themes in Humanities Higher Education.
Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 21–43.

Parker, J. (2003) ‘Writing, revising and practising the disciplines: Carnegie, Cornell and

the scholarship of teaching’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 2(2): 139–53.

Parlett, M. and Hamilton, D. (1972) Evaluation as Illumination: A New Approach to

the Study of Innovatory Programmes, Occasional Paper 9. Edinburgh: University
of Edinburgh Centre for Research in Educational Sciences.

Pascoe, R. (2003) ‘An Australian perspective on the humanities’, Arts and

Humanities in Higher Education, 2(1): 7–22.

Paterson, R. W. K. (1979) Values, Education and the Adult. London: Routledge &

Kegan Paul.

Perry, W. G. (1970) Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years.

New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Peters, M. (1995) ‘Education and the postmodern condition: revisiting Jean-

François Lyotard’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 29(3): 387–400.

Bibliography

219

Postman, N. (1982) The Disappearance of Childhood. New York: Random House.
Postman, N. (1985) Amusing Ourselves to Death. New York: Penguin Books.
QAA (1995) QO 12/95 Subject Overview Report – English. Higher Education Funding

Council for England, Quality Assessment of English 1994–95. Available at:
www.qaa.ac.uk.

QAA (2000) Subject Benchmark Statement – English. Gloucester: Quality Assurance

Agency for Higher Education.

Ramsden, P. (1991) ‘A performance indicator of teaching quality in higher education:

the Course Experience Questionnaire’, Studies in Higher Education, 16(2): 129–50.

Ramsden, P. (1992) Learning to Teach in Higher Education. London: Routledge.
Readings, W. (1996) The University in Ruins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press.

Rice, R. E. (2002) ‘Beyond Scholarship Reconsidered: Toward an enlarged vision of

the scholarly work of faculty members’, in K. Zahorski (ed.), Scholarship in the
Postmodern Era: New Venues, New Values, New Visions, New Directions for
Teaching and Learning No. 90. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Richardson, J. T. E. (2000) Researching Student Learning. Buckingham: SRHE and

Open University Press.

Robb, M. (1994) Living Arts: Words. Milton Keynes: Open University.
Säljö, R. (1982) Learning and Understanding. Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothobur-

gensis.

Salmon, G. (2002) E-Tivities: The Key to Active Online Learning. London: Kogan Page.
Salvatori, M. (2000) ‘The great educational divide’, in P. Hutchings (ed.), Opening

Lines: Approaches to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Menlo Park, CA:
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning, pp. 81–93.

Salvatori, M. and Donahue, P. (2002) ‘English studies in the scholarship of

teaching’, in M. Huber and S. Morreale (eds), Disciplinary Styles in the Scholarship
of Teaching and Learning: Exploring Common Ground. Washington, DC: American
Association for Higher Education and Carnegie Foundation for the Advance-
ment of Teaching, pp. 69–86.

SAQA (2000) The National Qualification Framework and Curriculum Development.

Waterkloof: South African Qualifications Authority.

Scholes, R. (1985) Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English. New

Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press.

Scholes, R. (1998) The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline.

New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Scholes, R. (2001) The Crafty Reader. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Schön, D. A. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner. New York: Basic Books.
Scott, J. W. (1995) ‘The rhetoric of crisis in higher education’, in M. Bérubé and C.

Nelson (eds), Higher Education Under Fire: Politics, Economics and the Crisis of the
Humanities. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 293–304.

Showalter, E. (2002) Teaching Literature. Oxford: Blackwell.
Shulman, L. (1997) ‘Disciplines of inquiry in education: a new overview’, in R.

Jaeger (ed.), Complementary Methods for Research in Education. Washington, DC:
American Educational Research Association, pp. 3–29.

Teaching & Learning English Literature

220

Smallwood, P. (1997) ‘Criticism and the meaning of ‘‘theory’’ ’, British Journal of

Aesthetics, 37(4): 377–85.

Smallwood, P. (2002) ‘ ‘‘More Creative than Creation’’: On the idea of criticism and

the student critic’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 1(1): 59–71.

Smith, K. (2004) ‘School to university: an investigation into the experiences of

first-year students of English at British universities’, Arts and Humanities in
Higher Education, 3(1): 81–93.

Snyder, B. R. (1971) The Hidden Curriculum. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Snyder, I. (ed.) (2002) Silicon Literacies: Communication, Innovation and Education in

the Electronic Age. London: Routledge.

Spaeth, D. A. and Cameron, S. (2000) ‘Computers and resource-based history

teaching: a UK perspective’, Computing and the Humanities, 34(3): 325–43.

Standish, P. (1991) ‘Educational discourse: meaning and mythology’, Journal of

Philosophy of Education, 25(2): 171–82.

Strathern, M. (ed.) (2000) Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability,

Ethics and the Academy. London: Routledge.

Stromquist, N. and Monkman, K. (2000) Globalisation and Education: Integration and

Contestation across Cultures. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Swales, J. (1990) Genre Knowledge: English in Academic and Research Settings.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Taylor, G., Ballard, B., Beasley, V., Bock, H. K., Clanchy, J. and Nightingale, P.

(1988) ‘Introduction’ to Literacy by Degrees. Milton Keynes: SRHE/Open Univer-
sity Press, pp. 1–6.

Thesen, L. (2001) ‘Modes, literacies and power: a university case study’, Language

and Education, 15(2/3): 132–45.

Thorpe, M. (2000) ‘Encouraging students to reflect as part of the assignment

process’, Active Learning in Higher Education, 1(1): 79–92.

Tyler, R. W. (1949) Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press.

VanZanten Gallagher, S. (2001) ‘Contingencies and intersections: the formation of

pedagogical canons’, Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Lan-
guage, Composition, and Culture, 1(1): 53–67

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978) Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological

Processes, eds M. S. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner and E. Souberman.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Widdowson, P. (1982) Re-reading English. London: Routledge.
Widdowson, P. (1999) Literature. London: Routledge.
Woolf, H. (2001) Assessment Criteria: Fuzzy by Design? Paper presented to the

Student Assessment and Classification Working Group Annual Conference,
Wolverhampton, 15 November.

World Trade Organisation Secretariat (2002) Trading into the Future. Available at:

http://www.wto.org.

Yorke, M. and Knight, P. T. (2004) Embedding Employability into the Curriculum.

York: Learning and Teaching Support Network.

Bibliography

221

EBSITES

Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS): at http://ahds.ac.uk
Arts and Humanities in Higher Education: An International Journal of Theory, Research

and Practice, Sage Publications: at www.sagepub.co.uk

Assessment and the Expanded Text Project, Northumbria University, UK: at

www.unn.ac.uk/assessingenglish

Australian Academy of the Humanities: at www.humanities.au
Australian e-Humanities Gateway: at www.ehum.edu.au
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, USA: at

www.carnegiefoundation.org

Carrick Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, Australia: at

www.autc.gov.au/institute.htm

Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Australia: at,

www.chass.org.au

Department for Education and Skills, UK: at http://www.dfes.gov.uk/

hegateway/hereform/index.cfm

Department of Education, Science and Training, Australia: at www.dest.gov.au
Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER), UK: at www.jisc.ac.uk/dner
English Association, The University of Leicester, UK: at www.le.ac.uk/engassoc/
English Department Home Pages Worldwide, USA: at www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/

english/links/engdpts.html

HEA English Subject Centre, UK: at www.english.heacademy.ac.uk
Higher Education Academy, UK: at www.hefce.ac.uk
Humbul (Humanities) Gateway, UK: at www.humbul.ac.uk/english
Literature Online: at http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk/
Moving Image Gateway, UK: at www.bufvc.ac.uk/gateway
National Computer Assisted Assessment Centre, UK: at www.caacentre.ac.uk
National Endowment for the Arts, USA: at www. nea.gov.
OpenCourseWare at MIT, USA: at http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html
Oxford Text Archive (OTA), UK: at http://ota.ahds.ac.uk/
Patchwork Text Project, UK: at www.apu.ac.uk
Plagiarism detection service, UK: at www.jisc.ac.uk/mle/plagiarism
Project Gutenberg: at www.gutenberg.net
QAA Subject Overview report – English, UK: at www.qaa.ac.uk
Sheffield Hallam University, UK: at www.shu.ac.uk
Speak-Write Project, Anglia Polytechnic University, UK: at www.anglia.ac.uk/

speakwrite

Special Educational Needs and Disability Act (SENDA), UK: at

www.hmso.gov.uk/acts/acts2001/20010010.htm

TechDis, UK: at www.techdis.ac.uk
Television and Index for Learning and Teaching UK: at www.trilt.ac.uk
University of Southern Queensland, Australia: at www.usq.edu.au
Voice of the Shuttle: at http://vos.ucsb.edu
World Trade Organisation Secretariat: at http://www.wto.org

Teaching & Learning English Literature

222

Index

Added to a page number ‘f’ denotes a figure and ‘n’ denotes notes.

academic agenda 25–8
academic literacies model 83–6
academic socialisation model 82–3
academic writing 80–4

essays see essays
models 82–4
pedagogy 86–9

academic-disciplinary core 43–5
accountability 29–30, 31, 206
action research 194–8
affective engagement 15–16
Alternative Wor(l)ds: The Humanities in

2010 205

analysis-interpretation-evaluation 35–6, 47, 61
applied linguistics 83
apprenticeship model, higher education 6
appropriate knowledge 166
‘Araby’ vignette 52–8, 70, 124, 131, 145
argument, in writing 85, 89–90n
Aristotelian mode of thought 39n
art, universality of the experience of 22
Arts Good Study Guide, The 87
Arts and Humanities in Higher Education: An

International Journal of Theory, Research
and Practice 8–9

assessment

of teaching 30
see also Research Assessment Exercise;

student assessment

Assessment and the Expanded Text project

185–6

assessors, role of 180–1
assignments

electronic submission 188–9
understanding 150–1

Australia

influence of external conditions 30–1, 33
quality assurance 194
teaching literary theory 70–1

Australian Academy of the Humanities 31
Australian Awards for University Teaching

Australian Institute for Learning and

Teaching in Higher Education 33

Australian Universities Quality Agency 30
author courses 25
authoritarian pedagogy 11
authority, disciplinary practices 85
automatic perception 50–2

Bakhtinian dialogics 27
belles-lettres 64–5
benchmarking see Subject Benchmarking
broadcasting 156
Bruner, Jerome 114–15

Canada, influence of external conditions 30
Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of

Teaching and Learning (CASTL) 33–4,
201

Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement

of Teaching 33, 201

Carrick Institute for Learning and Teaching

in Higher Education 33

centralised funding 33–4
Centres of Excellence in Teaching and

Learning (CETLs) 33

CHASS 31
choice, what and how to study 114
classical language instruction 10
classics 64
classroom control 34
close reading

teaching 49–58
see also New Criticism

coded questionnaires, student reviews

196–7

coercive element, teacher’s role 180–1
cognitive aims, of curriculum 98
cognitive core, curriculum design 97
cognitive skills/values 98–9
cognitive versus social structures of

disciplines 7

commercialisation 210

commitment, to students 199
communicating 156
communication, literary texts 35–6, 61
communications technologies see

information and communications
technology

communicative virtues 146–7
companionship, universality of 21
competence-based teaching 32–3
computer conferences 188
computer-marked testing 182–3
constructive writing exercises 87–8
content, signalling 45
contextualisation 45
conversion syndrome 75
course design 107–14

case studies 107–10
creative 93–4
globalisation 210
progression 114–18
QAA requirements 110–12
skills requirements 112–14

Course Experience Questionnaire 31
course provision 25–8, 103–5
courses, evaluating 193–204
courseware, free 209
coursework

assessment 175–6
versus exams 169–73

creative course design 93–4
Criteria for Scholarly Activity 203
criterion-referenced assessment 166–8
critical engagement 36–7
critical humanism 38
critical methods 113–14
critical review 153
critical thinking 61n
cross-disciplinary schools 31
cultural artefacts, databases 157
‘cultural studies’ approaches 28
culture wars 5
culture-based differences, teaching literary

theory 69–72

curriculum design

aims of the curriculum 97–9
creative 93–4
demands on the curriculum 95–7
globalisation 210
models 92–3, 118–19
subject benchmarking 99–107

databases, cultural artefacts 157
Dearing Report 113–14
death, universality of views about 21
deconstruction 27
deep-level approach, to study 41
‘delivering’ the curriculum 120n

Derridean perspectives 27
development

intellectual and personal 14–15
see also self-development

dialogics, Bakhtinian 27
dialogue 81, 145
digital texts 157
disciplinary core, curriculum design 97
disciplinary demands, on curriculum 95–6
disciplinary process 47–9
disciplinary purposes 205–6
disciplinary vigour 9–10
discipline boundaries 43
discipline-based versus generic approach,

to teaching 41–2

discursive knowledge 36
discussion

engagement in 59–60
evaluating courses and teaching 197
managing 145–6
online 188–90
pedagogy 59

drafting 88f
dumbing down, of higher education 6

e-learning 209
e-universities 34
economic pressures 205
editing 88f
education

internationalisation of 208–9
and learning 44
see also higher education

educational aims 123–5
electronic access, to texts 140
electronic teaching methods 156–8
emotional transport 15, 16, 17
engagement

in discussion 59–60
principle of 126–8
see also affective engagement; critical

engagement

English Benchmark Statement (QAA, 2000)

curriculum aims 100, 101, 105–6
student assessment 161, 162, 163, 165, 168,

171, 182

teaching arrangements for student

discussion 144

English Literature

in crisis 5–10
discipline in change 1
intrinsic justification 37–8
modern discipline 25–37
pedagogy, from ancient to modern 10–25

English Subject Centre survey

changes in student profile 50f
courses in theory/criticism 70f

Teaching & Learning English Literature

224

good teaching 48
hostility to national policy developments

29f

interdisciplinary study 117
IT teaching 112
learning through speaking 144
normal course provision 103–4
student choice 114
website 191n

espoused theories 198
essays 81–2

assessment 172
balancing voices 154–5
reflecting and reviewing 153–4
sample question types 151f
stages of 88f
understanding assignments 150–1

Europe, teaching literary theory 70–1
evaluation see analysis-interpretation-

evaluation

evaluative inquiry 193–204
exams

academic standard 174
increase in numbers of 176
justification for 174–5
versus coursework 169–73, 175f

existential issues 19–25
Experience of Learning, The 40–1
extensive knowledge 166
external conditions, influences of 28–34,

205–6

external demands, on curriculum 95

‘facilitating learning’ 42
facilitators 139
familial relations, universality of 21
feed forward 178
feedback, and learning 176–82
feminism, courses focusing on 26
fiction, reading 137
fields, new 206
flexible learning methods 6
focus groups, evaluating courses and

teaching 197

formative assessment 168, 188
Foucauldian approaches 27
frames, pedagogical 14
frameworks for understanding 127–8, 142
funding

centralised 33–4
influence of 29–30
public 206

funding formula, Australia 31

Galilean mode of thought 39n
General Agreement on Trade in Services

(GATS) 207–8

generic versus disciplined-based approach

41–2

genre(s) 26, 138
global approach, to pedagogy 11
globalisation

rising demand for higher education 7
trend towards 207–11

good teaching

defining 40–9
methods 122–5

Göteborg researchers 40–1, 42
governmental control, increasing 206
Graduate Destination Survey 31
Greek philosophy 10
group assignment 170
group grading exercises 167
group work 183–4, 188–90
guided reading 138

habitualisation 51–8
heuristic exercises 86–7
hidden curriculum 120n
higher education, marketing 6–7
Higher Education Academy 33
human condition 12–13
human physicality 19–20
human sociability 21–2
humanities

central concerns 205–7
federation of 8–9
neglect of 5

hypertext 158

idea generation 88f
ideational conflict 180
identity, academic 84
In the Course Experience Questionnaire

191n

independent study 115
information and communications

technologies (ICT) 156–8

inner-directed theorists 83
Institutional Quality Assurance and

Improvement Plans 30–1

intellectual development 14–15
intellectual traditions 63–5
intelligibility 45–6, 128–31
interdisciplinary study 117
Internet

creative work 158
plagiarism 179
see also online discussion; online portals;

online reading

interpretations

literary 68
see also analysis-interpretation-evaluation

intertextuality 132

Index

225

invitations, literary 22–3, 24
IT skills 112
iterative process, curriculum design 119

judgements, literary 68

Keats, metaphor of the reader 16
knowledge

discursive 36
domains of 115
technical 24–5
see also propositional knowledge; subject

knowledge

Knowledge Media Laboratory 33
KWIC 138

Latin philosophy 10
league tables 30
learner-centredness 120
learning

and education 44
and feedback 176–82
and literary experience 17–18
new methods 206–7
see also e-learning; Student Learning

Movement

learning diaries, reflective 187
learning outcomes 33
lectures, listening in 141–5
liberal education 14–19
life, universality of views about 21
linear model, curriculum development 92–3
listening 141–4
literacies, academic 83–6
literary canon 94
literary criticism, teaching 68–80
literary experience, and learning 17–18
literary invitations 22–3, 24
literary study, historical dislocations 66
literary techniques 24–5
literary texts see texts
literary theory

intellectual traditions 63–5
specialisation 65–6
teaching 72–80

acknowledging the difficulty 73–4
application of 76–7
approaches 68–72
‘engaging’ to understand 75
framing the study of 77–9
implications 79–80
‘preparing’ to understand 74

theoretical turn 67–8

literary travel 23–4
Literature (1830–1901): the Victorians 109
literature pedagogy

authoritarian frame 11

global approach 11
liberal education 14–19
sidebar topics 19–25
student connections 12–14

managerialism 32
marketing, higher education 6–7
Marxist approaches 27
mass media 16–17
master scripts 27
meaning

making of 35, 127
search for 2

meta-cognition 133–4
methodology 121n
Modern Languages, federation in 8
modularisation 176
moral criteria, universality of 21
multi-disciplinarity 116–18, 181–2
multiculturalism 20–1
multimodality 89n
multiple choice testing 182

narrative, primitive modes of 39n
narrative power 16–17
narrative technique 70
national policy initiatives, lack of faith in

29f

National Qualifications Framework (South

Africa) 31–2

New Criticism 67

literary experience 17–18
see also close reading

new historicism, courses focusing on 26–7
norm-referenced assessment 166–8
North America

decline of literary reading 49–50
external conditions, influence of 30, 33
teaching literary theory 69

online discussion 188–90
online portals 141
online reading 140f
open-book exams 175
organisational skills 113
Outcomes Based Education 31, 32
outer-directed theorists 83

paradigms, new 206
participation, principle of 131–2
Patchwork Text project 170
pedagogical canon 94
pedagogical frames 14
pedagogy

classical 10
classroom discussion 59
socio-cultural principles 125–35

Teaching & Learning English Literature

226

see also literature pedagogy; writing

pedagogy

peer assessment 184–5
peer collaboration 60
peer review 88f, 195–6
perception, automatic 50–2
performativity 159n
period courses 25
personal development 14–15
personal statements 186
philology 64
Philosophy in the Flesh 20
physicality, human 19–20
plagiarism 179–80
planning

essays 88f
lectures 143–5
for teaching 91–120

portfolios 186–7
positivism, scientific 66
‘postcolonial’ approaches 28
postmodern issues and themes, courses

focusing on 26

presentations 147–8
prewriting 88f
process-oriented curriculum model 118–19
product-oriented curriculum model 92–3
professionalisation, literary theory 65–6
professionalism 198–200, 204
programme assessment 163–5
progression 114–18

in assessment 173–6

Project Gutenberg 138
proofreading 88f
propositional knowledge 128
public funding 206

quality assurance 31, 32, 194, 210
Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) 30, 32,

100, 110–12

queer theory 26
questionnaires, student reviews 196–7

rational model, curriculum design 92–3
reader, Keats metaphor of 16
reading

teaching 136–41
see also close reading; proofreading

Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading

in America 49

reflective learning diaries 187
reflective practice 88f, 153–4, 194, 198
regional literatures, courses focusing on 26
relevance, literary study 13–14
religion, views about 22
research

additional, essays 88f

funding 29–30
teaching and 201–2

Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) 29–30
research based teaching 202
research informed teaching 202
research led teaching 202
research oriented teaching 202
researching 152–3
resources, electronic 157
retail model, higher education 6
reviewing, writing 153–4
revising, essays 88f
rhetoric 64

scaffolding 87, 121n
scholarship, redefined 203–4
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

(SoTL) movement 33, 200–2

scientific positivism 66
self-assessment 185–6
self-development 18–19
self-monitoring 194–5
semesterisation 176
seminar attendance 171
seminar presentations 147–8
SENDA (2001) 160n
Shadowlands 23
sidebar topics 19–25
signalling ‘content’ 45
skills

course design 112–14
Subject Benchmarking 105–7

skills model, academic writing 82
sociability, human 21–2
socialisation, academic 82–3
South Africa

academic writing 83
influence of external conditions 31–2

Speak-Write project 191n
speaking 144–50
specialisation

course design 115–16
literary theory 65–6
student assessment 181–2

spiral curriculum 114–15
staff recruitment 210
standardisation 32–3, 210
stories 22, 129
structure, in writing 85
student agenda 34–7
student assessment 161–91

criteria and standards 162–8
designing assessment regimes 168–76
feedback and learning 176–82
forms of 182–90
new methods 206–7

student choice 114

Index

227

Student Learning Movement 40–2
student review 196–7
Student Writing in Higher Education 84
student- versus teacher-centredness 134–5
students

commitment to 199
connections with literature 12–14
engaging 149–50
needs, demands on curriculum 96
preparation for seminars and discussions

sessions 148–9

writing and identity 84

study

approaches to 41–2
independent 115
interdisciplinary 117
rates 139
skills 132–3
see also literary study

Studying Literature (1901–1945) 107–9
style-labelled courses 25
Subject Benchmarking

curriculum aims 99–107
influence of 32, 34
knowledge 101–3
normal course provision 103–5
purposes of 100f
skills 105–7
statements 100–1
see also English Benchmark Statement

subject knowledge 101–3, 166
Subject Overview Report (QAA, 1995) 102,

110–11, 112, 113, 114, 118, 147

Subject Reviews 30
summarising 60
summative assessment 168, 184
surface-level approach, to study 41

tasks, understanding 151–2
teacher- versus student-centredness 134–5
teachers

authority, disciplinary practices 85
role in assessment 180–1

teaching

academic writing 80–4
close reading 49–60
evaluating 193–204
external assessment 30
literary theory 72–80
logical conditions for 44–6
planning 91–120
and research 201–2
trends 205–11
see also good teaching

Teaching Academic Writing 87
Teaching Development Grants 33

teaching methods 122–59

electronic 156–8
listening 141–4
new 206–7
reading 136–41
socio-cultural pedagogic principles

125–35

speaking 144–50
that work 135–6
writing 150–6

teamwork 112–13
technical knowledge 24–5
technical professionalism 198–9
texts

accessing 140–1
analysis-interpretation-evaluation 35–6,

47, 61

digital 157

themes, courses focusing on 26
theoretical orientation, teaching literary

theory 76–9

theoretical turn 67–8
theories-in-action 198
thought, modes of 39n
time management 113
transcultural power, of literature 20–1
travel, literary 23–4
truths, universal 21–2
tutor reviewing, essays 88f
two-stage assignments 170, 188

universality

human experience 19–20
human sociability 21–2

‘US Professors of the Year’ awards

programme 33

Utopias and Dystopias: Science Fiction

109–10

vicarious identification 15, 16, 17
views, universality of 21, 22
vocation 199–200
vocationally-oriented courses 32

whole-group developmental tasks 189
women’s writing, courses focusing on 26
Words (OU module) 125–6, 126–7, 129–31
workload 139, 159n
writing

belles-lettristic 65
teaching 150–6
see also academic writing

Writing at University: A Guide for Students 87
Writing in the Disciplines (WiD) 155–6
writing pedagogy 86–9

Teaching & Learning English Literature

228

Document Outline

Contents
Acknowledgements
Teaching and Learning the Humanities in Higher Education
Foreword
Introduction
Chapter 1 - The discipline today
Chapter 2 - What is good teaching?
Chapter 3 - Teaching literary theory and teaching writing
Chapter 4 - Planning for teaching: curriculum and course design
Chapter 5 - Methods of teaching
Chapter 6 - Student assessment
Chapter 7 - Evaluating teaching; future trends
Bibliography
Index

Wyszukiwarka

Podobne podstrony:
Using Communicative Language Games in Teaching and Learning English in Primary School
Communities of Knowledge Teaching and Learning
computer mediated dictionaries as teaching and learning tools
My Personal Philosophy of Teaching and Learning
10 English literature
10 English literature1
Dramat rok II semsetr I English literature year II drama sample questions
A survey of English literature Nieznany
Learning English Better
learning english? essays
BBC Learning English Adjectives Nieznany
History Of English Literature revision points sem1
01 Old English Literature
ENGLISH LITERATURE (1st SEMESTER)
English literature study guide 2018 dzienni
II FA English Literature 2 2016 sylabus 1

więcej podobnych podstron